Comment by sybercecurity
Comment by sybercecurity 2 days ago
Nokia produced several early smartphones. Most ran SymbianOS that showed what was possible. The connectivity wasn't there to make it really useful and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small.
I imagine that there were several people in Nokia that understood the potential of a phone that could also act like a mini-computer.
The first Nokia phone-mini-computer was the original Communicator, with a 640x200 resolution and a full keyboard, launched in 1996(!) Of course at that time it was targeted purely for business users, but by 2007 they already had a well-established high-end consumer smartphone selection (the N series – rather more advanced than the first iPhones). They just weren’t able to pivot to the touchscreen form factor, largely due to betting on Symbian – I can see how writing an entirely new OS userland from scratch wasn’t a terribly attractive idea.
In the end they did that too, of course, and the N9 was an astonishingly good phone, with a slick zero-button interface and silky smooth scrolling and multitouch gestures. And a terminal and reasonably-privileged root access if you were so inclined. I used a normal ssh/screen/irssi combo to IRC. It’s such a fucking shame that Maemo/Meego was killed.