Please Note:

I purchased the Nokia N900 from the New York Flagship store within the week it was released, I used that phone for 4 years. I have traveled to South America and Europe using Maemo 5. Please feel free to look at my posts here and see my contributions to the Maemo 5 community. I am writing this because in 2012 I found that the N900 was proving not to be an efficient communication device for me, I have experimented with Android (and NITDroid) on numerous occasions and found them to be glitchy and often gimmicky. I have always viewed Apple and their products as sub par to any developer or programmer as they are so closed off and proprietary. I hope that my "journey to the dark side" and how pleased I am with the path I took might enlighten others as it did in previous posts (as many did not know an iPhone could run SSHd and a VNC Server when jailbroken along with many other things). My experience with iOS has gotten better with every refinement of the operating system.


Hello old friends and comrades.

I wanted to say hello, from the perceived dark side, for those who might remember me I left the Maemo 5/N900 community around 2 years ago in search of a new device, that device was an iPhone 4S.

Here are links to the past threads about it:

New Phone Help... I can't do it any longer..

iPhone 4S: First Weeks Impression

N900 to Jailbroken iPhone 4S Thoughts

iPhone 4S (iOS 5.1.1): A look back at the N900

I am now on an 32GB iPhone 5S that has never been jailbroken (my choice, as jailbreak was available) and I also purchased a 16GB iPad Air to accompany my iPhone. As well as [gasp] an Apple TV.

I still have a problem with the iPhone not having an indicator LED and I think raising the headset up to your ear and removing it from your ear would be a nice feature that I miss from my N900 that Apple should incorporate.

Over the past two years I think we can all agree that IR technology, especially the one way IR technology of the N900 is now almost mute in comparison to Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC of it's Android counterparts.

Even though I owned (and still own) numerous batteries for my N900 I was never a battery swapper, on average use my iPhone will last me for over 24 hours on one charge. If in use in conjunction with my iPad, much longer. The concern of a removable battery never bothered me.

Flash, the argument being laughable in retrospect. Never really affected me.

Removeable storage... well that's a neat one. With the iPhone being able to use Google Drive (15GB, free), Dropbox (23GB, free), and iCloud (5GB, free, however I upgraded to 25GB for $20/yr) - those are just the services I use. That gives me a total of 63GB of cloud based storage. I have come to the conclusion that cloud based storage is far superior to removable storage, in nearly (will touch on that) every aspect (price, storage compatibility, storage limitations). I think Netflix proved this quite well to Blockbuster Video and Hollywood Video.

With iOS 7 I did not feel the need to jailbreak, there was a slight temptation but in iOS 7 my main issue was pretty much fixed: better multitasking. While I would like to SSH/VNC into my device it is not really a huge deal to me. Applications such as "Find my iPhone" are much more useful and practical.

PC and console games such as Max Payne, GTA III, GTA: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem, Duke Nukem 3D, and many more. I remember working on porting QBASIC Gorillas to the N900 in Python around 3 years ago.

Looking back, physically, well there's the LED indicator, still wish the iPhone had it. That is it.

In terms of software, I do miss the auto speakerphone script that was written for the N900. Wish the iPhone had that.

Other than that, I don't know how some of you could still be using the N900 as your primary communications device in 2014. I am happy to see the community is still thriving, as it is a great community.

Some gripes about the iPhone 5S/iOS 7:

For some reason iOS 7's implication of Siri is poor (as opposed to iOS 5/6), it was on my iPhone 4S and on my iPhone 5S, the voice recognition is not as good as it was previously - I can't explain it.

Applications such as Pages, Numbers, Skype, Dropbox, all the social media applications, all the clients such as Pandora, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu+, etc., as well as all the Google applications such as Hangouts, Google Maps, Docs, Sheets, etc. are all exceptional and lend the iPhone to a productivity level that is on par with a desktop computer. Not to mention all my data is automatically backed up and synced with iCloud. I can then manually put data in other cloud based services such as Dropbox and Google Drive. Couple that with having an iPad and one could easily take a business trip without a need for a laptop.

I have so many different methods of communication it is amazing to me, off the top of my head I have FaceTime, Skype, and Google Hangouts just for video chatting alone!

Some beefs I have with the iPhone (more specifically unjailbroken iOS 7): issues handling compressed files, lack of .PSD/.AI support from Adobe, but that's about it.

But there is one major beef I have and that's due to my personal habits, I torrent a lot of media - this presents two issues:

1) There is not a proper BitTorrent client for iOS

2) This is why I used the phrase "I have come to the conclusion that cloud based storage is far superior to removable storage, in nearly (will touch on that) every aspect" - it's not very plausible to download a 1.5GB TV show onto a device that is only 16/32GB. This does present an issue if you pirate your media (let's be honest, not everyone is going to pay to get HBO just for Game of Thrones). With that being said without access to a wireless hotspot or internet (such as on an airplane) viewing media is quite difficult (as I could just upload it to my Dropbox and view it from there).

Thus I am sticking by my assertion that the iPhone 5S running iOS 7.1 (if it is jailbroken then it opens up a lot of possibilities with file handling, a shell, SSHd, VNC server, etc.) is the best mobile device out there, especially if coupled with an iPad.

I have a business partner whose main device is a Samsung Note 3. I take out the N900 from time to time to demonstrate to him how closed Android is when compared to Maemo 5. I recently insisted he go to Walmart and pick up an iPad 4 just for work. He has really started to like it and uses it a lot (to both of our surprise).

For those of you who have moved on from the N900 what devices have you moved on to? How do you look back on the N900?

Edit: I should state due to my cloud argument that I have a grandfathered unlimited data AT&T plan. However, I think anyone who lives in city (as opposed to a rural area) would have plenty of WiFi hotspots.