The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t
I remember building simple PyQT apps on the N900, and then C++/Qt. At one point I was very tempted to start my own business and become a real developer for the platform while it was still "young", but it became apparent very quickly that Nokia was not seriously invested in it, and in any case they were not interested in small devs (getting an account for their joke of a store was a byzantine process, and expensive too iirc).<p>I attended an event with an "evangelist" here in Manchester, I was all fired up. It was some dude from Finland on a UK tour, and from the start it was all about the transition to QT on Symbian - this was to an audience full of people already working on iOS, to whom Symbian was a bad joke. He kept going on about the marvels of QT - which at that point was already a decade old and hardly a novelty, but clearly it had just reached Finland or something. Maemo was a footnote, "oh yeah we have that too", it was absolutely clear he just didn't care for it - the future was QT on Symbian. People were snickering; I wanted to strangle him. I reckon he single-handedly destroyed any local interest in developing for Nokia. I gave up shortly afterwards, and then the burning-platform memo happened and that was it.<p>My N900 is now an mp3 player for my 9yo son. The MicroUSB-B socket is a bit loose, iirc that was common with early adopters of that standard. The backlit keys have yellowed, or maybe the LEDs have. Everything else still works fine, although the software is obviously obsolete. My kid wonders why he has to press the screen that hard, and I feel like someone trying to explain ancient history.<p>What a waste, Nokia, what a waste.