It's pretty simple: hacker vs. user points of view
i used both N9 and N900. N9 was a way more polished, user-centric device. I love the UX and even how the device looks
however, for (low-level) hackers, N9/N950 was a bit hostile environment compared to N900. The first major stumbling block was Aegis (somewhat similar to Samsung's Knox perhaps). With N900, you can just boot any other Linux by simply loading u-boot to memory using the flasher. Nothing else. N9/N950's Aegis prevented that kind of luxury, so you needed to mess with the OS first, deal with permanent ominous warranty warning, and risk bricking it (see https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=81579). On the other hand, N900 is basically unbrickable. So N950 loses to N900 because of these reasons, even though it has a keyboard, a somewhat better one in fact
Yup, that's spot on. N9 felt good to use, but it was a disappointing device once you got used to the level of openness in a commercially supported product that N900 provided.
Still better than pretty much every alternative at that time though.
Pine64 doesn't do any software, so the comparison is apples to oranges :-)
The software from the N9 became what today is SailfishOS (mostly FOSS, but UI closed), and for something fully FOSS, Nemo is also derived from Harmattan, https://nemomobile.net/
> Pine64 doesn't do any software, so the comparison is apples to oranges :-)
True, but Pine64 facilitates the FOSS community in spades when it comes to shipping a hardware profile with mainline support, and ensuring it's trivial for Pinephone users to run alternative operating systems down to the boot loader.
I'm a developer and the N9 was completely opaque, it would have required spending significant time just to even begin figuring out how to replace the OS.
You can text and use gps on both of them, as well as make voice calls on the Motorola Droid 4 (calls work on N900, but you need complex audio routing and audio filtering. If anyone has experience with Linux audio, the project will appreciate their assistance)
Yes, they both have non-free PowerVR GPU, but its blobs work on Linux mainline, at least
That's good and bad haha, 3G was terrible. I agree with VoIP, I don't use regular calls anymore. Its amazing that the N900 is still being supported. What do you use these devices for? It seems like you'd have to disable javascript to browse with that ram amount, have to buy expensive replacement batteries or outdated OEM, and make a lot of tradeoffs. What keeps you using them over a newer one or a postmarketOS supported one? I love having control over my hardware, but I am less willing to trade off performance, I will root or jailbreak a phone and use it for 4 years or so, still love my 2012 S3 with root and 2GB ram though!
> Or was there something else about it?
It's pretty simple: hacker vs. user points of view
i used both N9 and N900. N9 was a way more polished, user-centric device. I love the UX and even how the device looks
however, for (low-level) hackers, N9/N950 was a bit hostile environment compared to N900. The first major stumbling block was Aegis (somewhat similar to Samsung's Knox perhaps). With N900, you can just boot any other Linux by simply loading u-boot to memory using the flasher. Nothing else. N9/N950's Aegis prevented that kind of luxury, so you needed to mess with the OS first, deal with permanent ominous warranty warning, and risk bricking it (see https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=81579). On the other hand, N900 is basically unbrickable. So N950 loses to N900 because of these reasons, even though it has a keyboard, a somewhat better one in fact