Nokia N900 Necromancy
114 comments
·December 12, 2025sollewitt
ZenoArrow
I wish the N950 was fully released, there were some produced but I don't think it was commercially available. It was the true successor to the N900, it would have used the N9 software but unlike the N9 it also had a physical keyboard.
theshrike79
The N950[0] was literal perfection. I had multiple friends who rand self-hosted servers on retired N900's :D
xyzzy123
Yeah the cyberpunk part is you can compute without explicitly needing someone's permission.
mikestorrent
So true! There will come a point at which there'll be two internets: the walled garden that only lets you in with Secure Attestation, Web Credentials for your verified age-of-maturity, etc. on a non-rooted device... and then the cyberpunk web where people running their own unofficial gear will be.
I wonder if one could do Anti-Secure-Attestation, like, only allow connections from rooted devices? Back to proving root by running a service on the good old sub-1024 ports?
eru
> I wonder if one could do Anti-Secure-Attestation, like, only allow connections from rooted devices?
Just ask the person to say a naughty word, I guess?
Tor3
My N900 (Made in Finland, an early one) was great. I would have used it still if it wasn't for the fact that after 3G disappeared it was useless. The battery could be replaced (as others have mentioned), so it was perfectly fine still. Mechanically it was as good as new as well.
As it was basically like Debian Linux inside I could do what I usually do - write hobby projects and run it on the N900. I had my minicomputer emulator running. Nice to see my old favourite minicomputer editor on my N900.
girvo
Gosh I loved my Nokia N9. Such an amazing little phone, and it's depressing a little that I can't use them anymore where I live
Sharlin
It was such an incredible phone. Easily rivaled the iPhones of the time and was light-years beyond any Android.
ITniggah
Haha, sure. Lightyears ahead buddy. "Grandpa tells wartime stories" vibes.
N900 couldn't even record stutter-free video, DSP overclock wasn't reliable. Configuring Card-/CalDAV was a manual nightmare, had to be done via a text editor. Adding contacts with a Skype ID automatically contacted these during sync.
No thanks! Even Android on an HP Touchpad was lightyears ahead of this drivel.
gspr
Here's what I don't get: why can't we have a modern one? It doesn't need to blow flagship smartphones out of the water. It doesn't even need to have a GSM baseband – I'd rather just connect through my "normal" smartphone than deal with all the complications of having a whole extra computer in there.
Surely this is getting close to realizable by hobbyists or a niche company?
Nextgrid
This is absolutely doable by a niche company. The problem is that you need to run this as a business. What plagues every free/open/libre project is that they're not run as a business; so they get distracted in all different directions trying to cater to ideals about free/libre licensing and so on, and end up missing the big picture.
You need to operate this as a business first, with the freedom part being a nice bonus. Nobody cares how free your thing is if it's dead on arrival and gets beaten by an entry-level smartphone.
Make a competitive product. Nowadays that could very well just mean Android with manufacturer-sanctioned root access and preinstalled terminal & X/wayland server for those who want to run desktop apps.
The Jolla phone someone linked below actually looks like a decent product. The Android app support means it's actually usable in the modern world, and the specs look competitive.
imp0cat
Have you seen the Jolla preorder? It was on hn a few days ago. That is the spiritual successor of the N9XX line.
testfrequency
My favorite story to tell friends about District 9 is how the first two times I watched it at home, my version did not have subtitles at all - so I was always so confused by the alien monologue scenes.
It wasn’t until I was at a friends home who had it playing in the background, I glanced at the TV and jokingly said I wish we knew what the aliens were saying…lo and behold, there’s subtitles.
aa-jv
I was always kind of dissuaded by the chunky, bar of soap nature of the Nokia devices. (But then again, I had a few OpenPandora to play with as well..)
I had high hopes for the Creative Labs Zii Egg back in those days, it seemed to me to be a better Linux-based phone-like device. What a world it was...
larodi
It is amazing Nokia missed on the mobile revolution as n900 predated iPhone if I remember correctly.
But Nokia did one massive mistake and it was to bet on Linux for this device. Even when they already had lot of Symbian experience, which also was week though when it came to user apps.
The modified BSD on the first iPhones was simply blazingly fast.
chriswarbo
A bigger mistake was to not give the N770, N800, etc. phone capabilities. I was buying a new phone around that time, and thought those devices looked cool; but I couldn't even consider them, because they couldn't do basic calls or SMS. They fixed that with the N900, but had lost their head-start.
Nursie
Good god no.
The iPhone was out two years ago before the N900.
Nokia was already fucked because it had set up a system in which internal divisions designed competing phones, as a result it had flooded the market with similar but-not-quite-the-same handsets with overlapping features, and it had missed out on usability advances that iOS had made.
Symbian was undergoing an overhaul which would eventually lead it to be ’good’ again, but by then it was too late as Android and iOS were already eating its lunch. And around the time of the N9 launch (touchscreen-only Maemo/meego phone), Stephen Elop took the helm and issued the famous “burning platforms” memo which put Nokia on the path to windows phone exclusivity, purely to the benefit of Microsoft, who delivered the killing blow by first forcing the doomed “Windows Phone” onto them, then buying the mobile phone division so MS could churn out more doomed handsets for their stillborn mobile platform.
tl;dr - The company was a clusterfuck riding on name recognition and then an MS plant killed it.
Linux on the N900 was neither here nor there. It was a skunkwork effectively, a niche device for nerds (and a great one). But it neither sank the company nor could have saved it.
ErroneousBosh
The underlying OS makes no difference.
BSD and Linux are the same thing. That's the whole point of Posix.
What made the difference for the iPhone was that Apple's most expensive part of the whole device was the design. At the point it came out they had something like 23 years of very high end UX under their collective belts. It's one of the reasons why the little 128k Mac that came out the same year as the clunky old IBM PC AT was so expensive, too.
Good design is expensive, and it's the most important thing you'll spend money on.
Remember earlier in the week, all the discussion of Damn Small Linux and how a lot of the conversation around its UI was along the lines of "But I like it without all the wasteful whitespace" contrasted with "The whitespace at least needs to be consistent and the widgets need to look like they weren't thrown from the far side of a barn"?
dtj1123
Sincere question: Can someone explain how you develop the skills and knowledge required to pull this off?
I'm no genius, but I'm reasonably sure I'm not a slouch either. I've got a masters in theoretical physics, I've worked with and written software for four years, I take an interest in anything techy I come across. I've picked up the basics of population genomics and molecular genetics without assistance.
I still find that projects like this are essentially black magic to me. Why are supercapacitors necessary to emulate a battery? How the hell does someone know how to mess with a bootloader in order to get past an internal partition corruption? How do you even tell if an internal partition is corrupted?
This is all stuff that I find massively impressive and enviable, but unlike essentially every other topic I've turned my attention to, there doesn't seem to be any readily identifiable path to mastery.
lambdas
You can pick it up passively over time, and with your skills, if you were to actively engage then I suspect pick up the necessary very quickly, and the rest comes from experience.
I picked up Linux at 13, fortuitously just in time for the release of the Nokia 770 (later getting, and still owning the N900 too).
At that time, getting real dirty with the kernel, hardware, cross compiling etc was necessary, so 1) there were more resources 2) it was seen as mundane, busy work rather than mystical and difficult.
If I were to say how to learn the same things today, I’d probably say Gentoo is ideal - it’s insanely flexible in tinkering, has good resources on compiling the kernel and packages, and I’m a fan of crossdev for cross compiling.
Getting real dirty with hardware and electronics, the obvious answer would be one of the Raspberry Pi lineup, but if you’re very tenacious, patient and a touch unhinged, then I would actually say now’s the time to get in on RISC-V.
It’s still early days, so there’s lots of resources that have very thin abstractions between hardware <-> tooling <-> code. Devices are cheap and exciting. You’ll be on the same footing as most other people so you won’t feel like a dunce.
The cons are that a lot of RISC-V devices get shipped out with very little documentation (and sometimes only in Chinese), binary blobs making mainstream kernels difficult, and you’re learning at the same time, so you might feel you’re ice skating uphill.
Wrt to the bootloader and partition corruption; towards the twilight years of the life of the N900, when it became clear N900 had been abandoned and the N950 was still only available to select few, a bunch of smart people on the Maemo forums started reversing and writing open drivers (uboot bootloader, wifi, camera iirc), so they became pretty documented.
saidinesh5
Honestly, It is just a matter of starting somewhere. Anywhere. All these hobbies are a huge rabbit hole that seem to converge.
I have friends who started with porting Sailfish OS to their old Android phone and now they are designing their own PCBs for their home automation system. They custom built their own RC cars, 3D printed their own ergonomic keyboards, designed their holiday decorative lights etc..
I have seen a lot of people in my local FPV Drone Racing community, who started with building their own custom drone and then moved on to 3D printing their modifications, tweaking their firmware, building their custom lithium battery packs, designing their ergonomic keyboards, and now fiddling with their home automation software/hardware.
Also installing Arch Linux onto some random piece of hardware, regularly following Hackaday like blogs seems to help.. lol.
Sammi
I don't have a degree in low voltage electrical engineering, but haven worked close to people who are this does all look like grunt work in that field. So maybe get a bachelor in low voltage electrical engineering? It's all as much digital/computational as it is actually physical these days. Lots of educated electrical engineers end up as software devs, often doing the low level coding. Bootloaders, firmware, and drivers are stuff you have to figure out if you want to get modern electrical hardware to do anything.
kilpikaarna
Can't claim to know the specifics, but there's some supporting links for both the battery and bootloader stuff in the article. The supercapacitor (can be a regular cap too, but would be physically much larger) is for buffering the power supply to prevent the device from shutting off if there's a momentary draw that causes the voltage to drop.
dtj1123
I appreciate what you're saying here, but what I'm asking about isn't the set of solutions to the problems described in the article. What I'm interested in is the underlying mental model of how this kind of device works.
seba_dos1
Why go through that device-breaking battery dance when you can still get a BL-5J battery pretty much everywhere?
Booting from an SD card, while possible, is rather impractical on N900 because it gets disconnected whenever you open the back cover.
The N900 that lays next to me right now still works as a phone. I have to replace its screen though, as recently it took some damage in my pocket and got a small crack in its bottom middle. Touch still works perfectly though, so I'm not in a hurry :D
j16sdiz
> The N900 that lays next to me right now still works as a phone.
It soon won't be. 3G and 2G network are being depreciated quickly around the world
daemonologist
I apologize for being that guy, but they are being deprecated. To depreciate is to decrease in value.
jjtheblunt
but then, deprecation causes depreciation in this case, for extra fun.
secult
In Europe we keep 2G as a failsafe, deprecating only 3G.
SahAssar
Not true, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G#Phase-out
Many countries/carriers in europe have already shut down 2G, many will shut it down in 2027. A few will keep it a few years more.
gbil
nope, check the link I posted in another comment: https://onomondo.com/blog/2g-3g-sunset-2/#europe
please note that the list is not fully up to date, eg. in Germany Voda and Telekom have said that they will sunset 2G in summer 2028.
LeoPanthera
Can I broadcast my own 3G cell inside my house with some magic radio device?
bigiain
Not legally. Where I'm from they sold off the old 3G spectrum and frequencies, mostly (all?) to established telcos to use in 4G or 5G mobile services. They will not be happy if you start interfering with their customers there (especially not after the money they spent at the auction for those licenses).
There are some weird bits of the 900MHz band that cross into the fairly free-to-use ISM bands in some countries, and I recall a CCC talk where someone demonstrated a SDR setup doing mobile phone base station stuff by sneaking into what were ISM bands in Germany where he was that handsets would talk to because they were allocated as cellular phone spectrum in other parts of the world. Here in Australia we are limited and can't use the upper end of the 920MHz ISM band with LoRa devices, because Optus bought that spectrum for their phone network.
(Here in Aust4ralia we have other cellular spectrum and phone network problems, where a lot of older devices that support some 4 and/or 5G cannot reliably call 000 (our equivalent emergency number to the US 911), because the fall back to 3G when roaming onto other networks... A few people have died recently, and all the telcos are busy blocking a growing list of phones, mostly older Samsung ones if the noise in mainstream media here is accurate. I know my old but still otherwise functional Galaxy S6 Edge is not on the banned list.)
yaky
I've only heard of doing so for 2G: https://hackaday.com/2025/10/06/2g-gone-bring-it-back-yourse...
kilpikaarna
Not sure about 3G, but here's an example of 2G: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMWvA4Ty1Wk
Edit: same as already posted hackaday, oop!
cl3misch
I think OP wants it to be an always-on device. The last sentence in the post is
> Nokia N900 enjoying its new life as an online radio device using Open Media Player.
But I agree with your sentiment. Using supercaps seems overengineered to me if the device is connected anyway.
yaky
Where's the fun in that?
Maemo wiki states that Maemo Leste should be run from SD card. I am actually surprised that the phone can use the SD slot at high enough speed.
seba_dos1
I agree that fun is enough of a reason, but treating the battery contacts with 5V seems like a rather sadistic kind of fun to me :P
Retr0id
> it gets disconnected whenever you open the back cover
Does it? I don't recall mine doing so.
seba_dos1
Yes it does (based on a hall sensor), though looking up it turns out that it's actually the Nokia's kernel that does it, so other OSes may not do it.
tetris11
Yep, I remember there being a magnet hack placed on the kickstand so that it would be detected properly
leke
I used to work as a software tester in Tampere, Finland with Nokia devices. We didn't test those devices in particular, but they were a big buzz in our office back in the day. I still have my n810, but haven't used it in years after the battery died. I remember adding a bunch of unofficial repos and having things like apache and python running on it and using it as a web server for a while. Eventually the battery was so discharged, even having it plugged in to the PSU would not be enough to keep it powered. It was such a shame it wouldn't run without the battery. I probably would still have use for it.
isopede
I have such fond memories of the Nokia N810.
I did my master’s thesis on that device. I had a custom hypervisor running a guest kernel, virtualized networking, and a buildroot userspace. I could SSH into the host N810, then SSH into the guest. I even virtualized the framebuffer at some point and got the “dancing baby” animation playing from the guest. It only ran at a couple frames per second, but it was _amazing_.
theshrike79
The only weird thing about it was that you couldn't charge a fully empty N810 with the micro(?) usb charger. It'd charge just enough to boot and then crash again, because it couldn't wake up far enough to negotiate a higher current with the charger.
Had to use a barrel plug to charge it.
Spent a very nervous and sweaty day figuring that out when I bought one used with no warranty or returns and it didn't boot properly =)
ACCount37
It sure is a weird thing, but yes, the first mobile devices that shipped with USB didn't really know how to charge off it.
specialp
I remember when the N900 came out other phones including the iPhone could not process a web page with AJAX or most javascript and Flash. It truly gave you a desktop experience on a phone. You could open a terminal and ssh into a server or do whatever you want. Another funny thing people forget: It had another Finnish company's game for it that later became wildly successful: Rovio Angry Birds
vvpan
I think Stellarium got its mobile start on N900 as well.
internet2000
Web browsing wasn't a particular strength of it. I remember the N900's browser came with a version of Gecko around a year old by the time. Flash support was a downside. And of course, contemporary iPhones ran circles around it in smoothness.
antran22
I'm just wondering if there is any real modern pocket cyberdeck with the form factor of those old phones, with a slide out physical keyboard.
rcarmo
The folk who left Psion tried to resurrect the Psion 3/5 form factor a few times as an Android phone with a fairly decent keyboard, but I don’t think they’re still around (or that it’s cheap enough to justify getting one).
sschueller
I find the BL-5J battery format and its siblings quite cool actually. They fit much better for some projects than a 18650 etc. I wish there where more standard sized batteries and PCB holder for batteries like the BL-5J. While I can get many 18650 battery holders for PCBs even surface mount I have not seen anything more compact.
xiaomai
I had an n800 in college (it wasn't a phone, it was an "internet tablet"). _Loved_ that thing.
xp84
There are DOZENS OF US!
Picture me in 2007. "The iPhone. Psh. Like I'm going to switch to Cingular and pay thirty dollars for a data plan!" (Keep in mind that's $47 in today's dollars!)
I would use my N800 and Bluetooth-tether to my Verizon flip phone when on the go. It was mildly useful for things like LiveJournal and I'm sure the Twitter of that time would have worked on whatever browser Maemo had. But I had to admit by 2008 that I wanted a smartphone instead of this second device with a stylus.
In those days though, browsing the web as though you were on a desktop was thought to be the goal to aspire to. Even the iPhone launched with the default behavior in Safari being showing whole desktop webpages, and you zoomed in to the parts you wanted to use. It took a year or two for people to figure out 'responsive' and within 4 years most sites were starting to be designed for small portrait screens. At that point the landscape N800 style was at a disadvantage since the mobile sites being designed to be a little leaner, were the wrong layout, but the desktop sites were pretty heavy for a mobile device to handle. And as "apps" ate the world that probably put the final nail on our little N-series.
thesandlord
I remember running around campus looking for WiFi hotspots with my N810, using Google Voice to text my friends ($0.10 per text, no thank you!). Learned so much Linux admin skills that became so useful later in life. Favorite device ever! Eventually moved to Android smartphones but the ease of hacking, the amazing community (internettablettalk.com, looks like its gone now :( unfortunately...)
hexnuts
You could always get something like a PinePhone.
vel0city
Back in the day I just had a cheap dumb phone with the $15/mo unlimited 3G data add-on and popped that SIM into whatever other device I was feeling at the time. It seemed like if it wasn't a common phone in the US, Cingular/AT&T never noticed.
jacquesm
I still have an N800-tough, it still works. It even holds a five day charge. This is from after the reboot, it runs linux and so far it has been ultra reliable. I have an older one as well that still works but this one is just a little more useful (it can serve as a wifi access point).
niemandhier
There is so much love for the n900 and the n950.
Yet still there is not true successor, although I would expect that producing things like this became cheaper in the recent years.
pjmlp
Yes, the alternative universe had Nokia board not hired Elop.
The N900 was my peak “mobile computing is awesome” device.
I went to see District 9 in the cinema in Helsinki. Uh oh, the alien parts are only subtitled in Finnish and Swedish and my Finnish is not up to that.
I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien.
The N9 had much better UI, but there was something of the cyberpunk “deck” idea in that thing, it was great.