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Comment by bergie | Hacker News Reader

You seem to think mass-market consumerism is the only kind of success. I assume you view Arduino and the Rasperry Pi also as utter failures?

The Internet Tablets were not intended to that market (N9 was the first real mass-market device, the step 5 of 5), but instead were well-loved by the hacker niche.

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>>>The Internet Tablets were not intended to that market

Then why were they on sale to the general public in stores? They were intended as mass-market devices. And they failed on that score.

I'm hoping MeeGo will not be similarly botched. I liked what I saw -- from an Internet distance -- of MeeGo on the N9. I wish Nokia had gone with that instead of Windows.

From back in 2009:

Nokia currently views the N900 and Maemo as "bridge" products mainly targeting developers and enthusiasts, but aims to develop Maemo into a mass market platform to compete with the iPhone OS, Android, and Windows Mobile, competitors that Symbian has been losing market share to.

http://www.pocketables.com/2009/11/nokia-nseries-will-likely...

But agreed, N9 was really an amazing device. You can see that the focus and polish needed for mass market was there.

>>>Nokia currently views the N900

Notice that starts with the N900, not the 770. They had to spin after the failure.

Not exactly, the N900 was the first with a cell radio (except N810 wimax which short lived) so it was a 'bridge' between cell phones and the tablets.

Jolla could well outlive Nokia now, with the right manfuacturing partner. (HTC is getting dumped the same as they were with Microsoft, would love to see them embrace this with their QWERTY designs)

I wish Jolla luck. It'd be something if they could pull it all off.

Why should you wish that Nokia had gone with that instead of Windows, if you think that Maemo was a horrible failure?

Harmattan is a very nice UI with some innovative features. But if underneath it, loading software will require chasing down "dependencies," then maybe the beauty is only skin deep.

Bad repos might have been the source of your 'dependency' problems, Nokia was the only mobile device user to embrace apt and had a much better product than the CE devices that used 'reflashing' as in wiping the universe and starting over.

N770 was understood and loved by the hackers, but not by the general public, and was a commercial failure. It was also more powerful than most of the other devices out there and ran more general purpose software than the popular PDAs and smart phones. (WM could run CE apps but not Windows apps, N770 could run any X application with recompilation.)

It wasn't until the iPhone that a Unix device was accepted by the general public, and only because Apple did a better job of hiding that from the public. (And other things as well

Of all the mobile electronics I've ever had, I remember my N770 the most fondly and wistfully. next to my then modern HTC Apache Windows Mobile device, it was like an artifact from the future. I coded up several great apps for it in python including a personal finances ledger and a price checker using the Amazon API. The thing was amazing. Even though it has since died and I've moved on to Android, I miss it.

I find it hard to apply the label 'Unix' to an OS which cannot multitask. A few directories wholly hidden from the user, with no available shell, gutted utilities and services, and little if any meaningful interaction between programs, does not constitute Unix.

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