Discussed in HN many times, but worth restating once more. The N9 was fantastic. A joy to use, and in many ways the best design, both hardware and software, I've ever handled. Everything had been designed with care and some UI elements remain unmatched.

I think I was one of the first developers that got an N770 engineering sample (the first product in the N770-N9 saga) and it was really clear that they were onto something. Sadly, internal politics won over company and consumer interests. It took them extremely long to let this be a phone, not just an "Internet tablet". It was bizarre.

The same team is now behind Jolla/Sailfish. It's pretty remarkable how far they've got, but it's obviously not a perfect product given how small they are compared to the other mobile juggernauts. However, it's usable as a daily driver and, with a critical developer mass, it could get somewhere. There are already quite a few indie apps.

Crucially, I think it's the only platform that has the potential to set you truly free. GrapheneOS is the other alternative I can also endorse and tolerate, but it has a different set of compromises, and it's a bit fragile to Google pulling the plug. But it's great in its own ways.

The N9 shipped when it did because the teams working on the successor project had been pulled back to support the N9, and Elop arrived to find a company betting its future on a new platform that had almost no existing third party support and which wouldn't have any follow-up hardware for another 2 years. Google has no incentive to work with Nokia rather than the existing vendors who'd staked themselves to Android, the other competing platforms at the time were basically all tied to a single vendor, but Microsoft wanted a recognisable brand name and would throw engineering resources at supporting them. With hindsight it obviously didn't work, but Meego as a competitive platform was already dead even without heading in the Microsoft direction.

It's funny that these conversations always focus on Elop and not all the decisions already made by the time he showed up. Maemo bring rebased on Qt at the insistence of the Series 60 team so there could be a transition story from S60 to Linux delayed software development significantly, and the merge with Moblin was ultimately entirely unnecessary churn.

It's a convenient story to blame Nokia's failure on Elop and Microsoft, but in the timeline where that transition didn't happen we'd still look back at the N9 as the last gasp of a giant that failed to adapt to the changing market fast enough. The N9 came out almost 4 years after the iPhone - the Pre had landed two years earlier and even so had failed to gain sufficient market support to survive, and HP killed WebOS a few months after the N9 shipped. In 2011 momentum was entirely with iOS and Android. If the N9 had shipped in 2009 they might have had a chance. Instead, the N900 was shipped in limited company quantities with woefully uncompetitive hardware.

It's 2011. Faced with an ecosystem that has changed massively in the past 4 years that's destroyed your high end market and is threatening your medium and low end market, and given the choice between an (absolutely beautiful!) in-house platform with no killer apps and two years before you can ship a successor, and the opportunity to tie up with a dominant OS vendor who'll prioritise your brand and provide engineering support and make it possible to churn out several new high end devices in that two year timeframe, which seems like the better choice?

It wouldn't necessarily have been better, a major reason the Windows phone stuff failed is it didn't have market share to justify app development. Android barely made it work as a well-funded #2. Palm WebOS, MeeGo, there were various efforts that were better than Android and even iOS in a lot of ways but app availability seems to have been the biggest factor in the lack of platform diversity.

Edit: And consistent with sibling comment Microsoft was even paying companies to build apps for their platform, and it _still_ wasn't enough.

I think they would still fail with MeeGo, same like Blackberry failed even though they had really good OS. I remember was going to their conference in amsterdam and were giving their new Blackberry Tablet for free to attract developers to make any app.

If Nokia and Blackberry team up they maybe would succeed. Nokia Mobile still could be around if instead choosing Windows Phone would release Android phone back then.

> We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones.

We had that and we still do. Back in 2008 I was wondering whether I should spend my first-earned money on the first Android phone (HTC Dream, aka T1) or a "plain Linux phone" (Neo Freerunner) and I've chosen the latter. Ultimately it was a good choice, as Android quickly turned out to be not what I wanted and only got worse over time, while the other path had me eventually go through Nokia N900 and Librem 5, and both of them worked well as mobile phones and pocket-sized computers. They feel like actual smartphones compared to Android and iOS which feel more like appliances that have largely replaced the so called feature-phones of the past.

That said, Nokia N9 was already strafing away from that path, with its Aegis framework that attempted to lock the device down in hopes to, basically, enforce a form of DRM. It turned out not to be very effective, but it would undoubtedly have kept being improved in later iterations, slowly eroding that unrestricted agency of the user that the N900 was famous for.

> We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones.

IIRC, the dominant position back then was "Android is Linux". Shuttleworth closed his famous #1 bug on Canonical that was their mission in 2013 because now Android/Linux is more popular than Windows and the future is mobile[1]. Also Google still had a lot of good will in the OSS/Linux community back then so most "Mobile Linux" attempts were met with "Just use Android"

[1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/05/mark-shuttleworth-marks-...

I loved Nokia's Linux phones, and bought several of them. I drove to New York (from Boston) twice to get an N900 as early as possible. But I wonder what they would have had to do to make that line of phones a mass-market success. Users of the N900 had root privilege. Can you imagine a support nightmare that would have been for T-Mobile et al.? To sell Linux phones to the general public, I think they would have had to lock down the OS to the point that it resembled what Android is today.

> We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones. Sad to me. I wonder where this could have gone without Microsoft.

Sadly, I strong suspect it would have gone nowhere. Apps became the name of the game and iOS and Android built up strong app libraries quickly. If Microsoft failed to compete I don't think a Nokia Linux phone would have stood a chance at all. Maybe if it added Android compatibility but that would be as much of an admission of failure as anything.

Reviewers were nice to it because they knew it was DOA.

It did have some good sides but it was in most ways worse than comparable iPhones and androids.

Every time a Linux sprouts out somewhere, Microsoft flamethrower comes over. Consumer market, academic environment, public office. I heard that Bill will cure malaria and covid just anytime now, the day after universal healthcare will be introduced in US.

Not far. Not even MS had the clout to impose a third alternative in phones, and it was needed.

And WindowsPhone was actually a good design for user interaction, with the exception of some underlying clunkiness of settings.