Comment by potatolicious
Comment by potatolicious 7 days ago
+1. I sometimes hear nostalgia for the N900 but personally I don't get it.
Anybody could run a full multi-tasking OS on a mobile device trivially. The performance sucked and you killed your battery super quickly.
The innovation was in multitasking that didn't result in a terrible user experience, and it took a lot to get there! And the answer wasn't "welp what if we just treated this thing like a desktop".
And it's still not a fully solved problem - there continues to be a lot of movement around how apps are defined so that they can be efficiently concurrent! (or at least give the appearance of concurrency)
My recollection was that the N900 battery lasted about a full day of normal use. Maybe two but it was a dice roll. That was pretty much on par with other smartphones on the market. IIRC the main thing android and iOS were doing was shutting down apps to save memory. But perhaps I saved a ton of battery by not buying a data plan? At the time, I had wifi at home and work, and a 100 dollar a year prepaid cell plan.
And the UI did have plenty of affordances. Basically all the apps were custom, and I vaguely recall there being something close to the home / back on screen button android used in the early days. Heck, it's still a pita to switch apps on my Pixel: swipe up, but not too fast, or it'll bring up the full app list instead of the switcher.
But sure, there's plenty to dislike about the n900: it had a resistive touch screen and a stylus. Turn by turn navigation sucked for most of its life. The app store launch was so botched that it was basically dead on arrival. The microusb port sucks.