Let's compare the Nokia N900 (Nov 2009) to the Motorola Droid (Oct 2009).
They arrived at about the same time. They used the same CPU. They both had (approximately) 800x480 screens, which at the time was flagship class. They both used slide-out keyboards, removable batteries, a 5MP camera, 256MB of RAM, and some on-board storage plus a microSD slot. They weighed within 20g of each other.
The N900 had a resistive touchscreen, the Droid was capacitative. Both had an official price of $600-650, but would actually be sold for $200-250 when bought with a 2 year carrier plan (that was the norm back then).
Maemo had a small developer community. Android had a medium-sized dev community. Android had marketing -- for about 2 years, people were calling all Android phones "Droids". Maemo had none.
> The N900 had a resistive touchscreen, the Droid was capacitative.
N900 touchscreen was great. Not only was it perfectly readable in direct sunlight, it was also much more accurate than capacitive screens and not anywhere close to cheap resistive screens' clunkiness people usually imagine when hearing the term. The only issue I had with it was that they tend to develop issues after years of use, so my Nokia N900 does some very annoying ghosting these days.
True but the UI did often require the stylus to be pulled out. Compared to the capacitive screens it was pain to use. I did try and I used the N900 as a daily driver for a good couple of years but that UI wasn't designed for use without the stylus.
I still however miss Windows Phone, there were some major mis-steps by Microsoft (the intial side load / developer story) forcing a software break with the move to Windows Phone 8. However as a user provided you could live with the pre-installed apps it was a great phone.
The N900 was as close to a pure Linux phone as you could get at the time.
People ran IRC clients directly on the console on it. A few friends of mine ran them as IRC hosts on their home network well into the 2010s - it was basically a Raspberry Pi with a keyboard and display =)
The N900 had 32 GB of storage, which was absurdly huge at the moment. That phone could have seen sold at $300-400 with 2-4 GB of storage, which was more than enough at the time. My first Android phone, in 2010, had 0.5 GB of storage.
Let's compare the Nokia N900 (Nov 2009) to the Motorola Droid (Oct 2009).
They arrived at about the same time. They used the same CPU. They both had (approximately) 800x480 screens, which at the time was flagship class. They both used slide-out keyboards, removable batteries, a 5MP camera, 256MB of RAM, and some on-board storage plus a microSD slot. They weighed within 20g of each other.
The N900 had a resistive touchscreen, the Droid was capacitative. Both had an official price of $600-650, but would actually be sold for $200-250 when bought with a 2 year carrier plan (that was the norm back then).
Maemo had a small developer community. Android had a medium-sized dev community. Android had marketing -- for about 2 years, people were calling all Android phones "Droids". Maemo had none.
> The N900 had a resistive touchscreen, the Droid was capacitative.
N900 touchscreen was great. Not only was it perfectly readable in direct sunlight, it was also much more accurate than capacitive screens and not anywhere close to cheap resistive screens' clunkiness people usually imagine when hearing the term. The only issue I had with it was that they tend to develop issues after years of use, so my Nokia N900 does some very annoying ghosting these days.
True but the UI did often require the stylus to be pulled out. Compared to the capacitive screens it was pain to use. I did try and I used the N900 as a daily driver for a good couple of years but that UI wasn't designed for use without the stylus.
I still however miss Windows Phone, there were some major mis-steps by Microsoft (the intial side load / developer story) forcing a software break with the move to Windows Phone 8. However as a user provided you could live with the pre-installed apps it was a great phone.
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I had both at the time... the nokia was more capable. Android kept iterating and copying apple until it was pretty useful.
The N900 was as close to a pure Linux phone as you could get at the time.
People ran IRC clients directly on the console on it. A few friends of mine ran them as IRC hosts on their home network well into the 2010s - it was basically a Raspberry Pi with a keyboard and display =)
The N900 had 32 GB of storage, which was absurdly huge at the moment. That phone could have seen sold at $300-400 with 2-4 GB of storage, which was more than enough at the time. My first Android phone, in 2010, had 0.5 GB of storage.
I think partly this was because they wanted only the highest end phones not using Symbian.
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