In 2005, Nokia very quietly launched the N770 as an experiment. Unlike its competitors, it has no keyboard but a wide screen that could be used with a stylus. Inside was running a Debian system with an interface based on GNOME: Maemo.
Ooh, I remember these! I never got to use one for long enough (the N770 & friends were not the kind of thing I could get on a student’s budget) but I did get to play with them. The description in this article is… very spot on. It was a little hard to explain what it was for, what you could do with it, and why.
There was a flurry of activity in this space on Linux at the time. That flurry of activity had started quite some time before, I think, but it didn’t have that much recognisable commercial backing. The earliest device I remember to have sparked a lot of interest was Sharp’s line of Linux-powered Zaurus PDAs. I drooled over those for years. But NetBSD and Linux were ported to a bunch of other commercial devices, with varying degrees of success (think things like HP Jornadas). I used one of those throughout engineering school, as nobody would ship a real (and rather expensive) graphing calculator to my part of the world, but xmaxima ran okay on… I don’t recall if NetBSD or Linux, but one of them, in any case. It wasn’t a very good experience though. Sharp’s PDAs were definitely better in every regard, but there was no way I could afford one at the time (not that anyone would’ve shipped me one). They were faster, had some real batter life (I made my Jornada useful by rigging a DIY contraption that we’d now call a powerbank to it), and it shipped with some usable applications written with Qtopia.
So there was some precedent but the N770 was just… like nothing anyone had really seen. There were some precedents in terms of form factor: Exilien systems, for example, had some entirely keyboardless devices that came in a vaguely tablet-ish form factor, but I don’t think anyone had seen one of those in Europe and even the handheld PC variant was recognizably a PDA. Or some special-purposed devices, like the Node Explorer, I think it was called, and some… Archos-I-don’t-remember-what-it-was-called, which weren’t exactly general-purpose systems per se (the Node Explorer was a navigator, and the Archos thing was a… video recorder of sorts, I think), but they came with a bunch of “general-purpose” software (note-taking and whatever) and a SDK, and you could run your own apps on them.
There had been some attempts at desktops for devices like these before, too. Matchbox comes to mind. That link is from a Wayback Machine snapshot from 2005. I could swear the project was older than that and it had a different website, but maybe I’m misremembering… However, they didn’t get much traction and they weren’t exactly integrated systems, either. You’d get a nice, PDA-sized launcher, sure – but then you were still going to run xterm or Evolution or whatever. Maemo was, in this regard, a huge leap forward.
I think the world was kind of getting over PDAs by that time. I mean, PDAs were still being made and marketed (I remember a bunch of new, at the time, Acer… or was it Asus? devices that could run Linux) but people were already starting to look for alternatives. Most people could kind of articulate the fact that the palm/hand-held factor was nice, but really awkward to use except as an agenda, minimal email writing and the like.
The iPhone was still two years away (and, along with it, things like OpenMoko) but that didn’t stop people from trying to figure out how to improve the touch model (Palm had really good handwriting recognition of sorts and I think some people tried to bring that over to Linux land, but I can’t quite remember who or with what software; and there was also some… spatial input system of sorts, where you’d drag your pen on the screen towards letters to form up words). And notebook vendors were looking into smaller and smaller form factors – not to the point where they’d make “new” handheld PCs, but netbook would become a thing in about two years’ time.
I remember getting excited about the DEC Itsy in 1999. The Intel StrongARM SA1100! Accelerometers for scrolling! Pure unobtanium, readily identifiable as future tech at the time.
I bought an N800 because a friend in the local Linux Linux User group basically peer-pressured me into buying it. It was a neat little device but painfully underpowered and the resistive touchscreen was not fun to use. After I got done with the initial tinkering phase, aside from light web browsing, the killer app for this thing was listening to podcasts because it had wifi and a built-in speaker. Pre-smartphone, on the road, I used to plug the headphone jack into a cassette adapter plugged into the car stereo. Worked fine and pretty decent battery life too.
I briefly owned a Linux-based PDA that was a straight-up PalmPilot knockoff, running on a MIPS(!) CPU. Passive-matrix black-and-grey LCD, something very much like Graffiti handwriting recognition with a flimsy little stylus… I got it cheap on eBay, it was dead stock from a dead startup, in 2004 I think. Never found a use for it.
Maybe you were thinking of Dasher? That was an interesting take on predictive text input. I don’t think it was ever in a commercial product, though. There were a lot of interesting ideas about mobile device UIs before Apple came in and paved the trail that Android immediately followed.
A few years later, the Maemo hardware successor of the N770 eventually got a slide-out keyboard, I think that was the N810. Blackberry was dominant, and there were many serious keyboard phones, although none of them were running “linux” to my knowledge.
I briefly owned a Linux-based PDA that was a straight-up PalmPilot knockoff, running on a MIPS(!) CPU. Passive-matrix black-and-grey LCD, something very much like Graffiti handwriting recognition with a flimsy little stylus…
Sounds like the Agenda VR3, I still have mine. This was in the Palm Pilot era so they didn’t have connectivity (besides a serial port for syncing). My first connected Linux PDA was a Sharp Zaurus 5500 with a CF wifi card. First time I was able to have ssh and my Emacs session in my pocket.
64MB RAM, 16MB flash, and a 320x240 screen. Or rather 240x320 as it was portrait.
The sheer amount of thought and planning that went into the Linux-based Zaurus was shown by the fact that the tiny physical keyboard had no pipe symbol. Bit of a snag on an xNix machine, that.
But you don’t mention the extra you got with a wifi adaptor – a battery life of about 15-20 minutes.
I think this depended on the type of CF card? I don’t remember mine being nearly that bad. In my rose tinted memories my ssh sessions easily made it through meetings.
I can’t remember what I did for the pipe symbol on the Zaurus but yeah, this sort of thing has been a problem with almost all mobile hardware keyboards ever since. Later on I wrote a small pty wrapper that uses a prefix scheme to send missing characters. It’s possible to do the same with tmux bindings too.
Interesting! Both mine were 2nd hand, given to me by techie mates who’d played with them and got bored and moved on. Maybe their tiny batteries were already on the way out or something.
Fun side-note #1: I do not remember the battery pack looking like this one, though. I feel sure I would have noticed.
Fun side-note #2: both came with Sharp’s original OS, version 1.0. I had an interesting time experimenting with alternative OS builds, new ROMs etc. Things did get a lot better, or at least less bad, after the first release. But the friend who gave me my first unit swore up and down that he’d update the ROM. I can’t see any possible mechanism for flash memory to just revert to earlier contents on its own, though.
With replacement OS images you had to decide how to partition the device’s tiny amount of storage: some as read-only for the OS, some as read-write, some as swap, etc. The allocations were fixed and if you got it wrong you had to nuke and reload.
This would have been much easier if the device had some form of logical volume management, and dynamically-changeable volume sizes.
Which is a thought I also had repeatedly around 2023-2024 when experimenting with OpenBSD. It uses an exceptionally complex partitioning layout, and if you forcibly simplify it, you (1) run up against the limitations of its horribly primitive partitioning tool and (2) reduce the OS’s security.
I have got just barely competent enough with OpenBSD that between writing this in early 2022 and writing this in late 2024, two and a half years later, I went from “struggling mightily just to get it running at all in a VM” to “able with only some whimpering and cursing to get it dual-booting on bare metal with XP64, NetBSD, and 2 Linux distros.”
But it’s still a horrible horrible experience and some form of LVM would make matters massively easier.
Which is odd because I avoid Linux LVM as much as possible. I find it a massive pain when you don’t need it. However, you need it for Linux full-disk encryption, and one previous employer of mine insisted upon that.
In other words: I really dislike LVM, and I am annoyed by Linux gratuitously insisting on it in situations where it should not strictly speaking be needed – but in other OSes and other situations, I have really wanted it, but it wasn’t available.
Yes! Dasher! I remember it coming pre-installed (or at least… easily available?) with some distributions, and I had a friend who ran it on some Compaq thingie.
This may be the first time I’ve heard Android described not as “sidekick 2.0” but as “repurposed software for cameras”. :D The early to mid zeros were a chaotic time for phones in North America, and I don’t think there was as much European crossover as there is now, so it makes sense that a lot of these NA products must have seemed to come out of nowhere.
In a (very mild) defense of Nokia, it also wasn’t initially obvious that the people buying “data devices” that used cell networks, would actually want to make voice calls on them: phones were for extroverts, data terminals were for nerds. It was really the carriers who started insisting on unified devices.
I ended up reading the first two parts as well, and they were both very interesting! Thanks for chronicling this! :)
Ooh, I remember these! I never got to use one for long enough (the N770 & friends were not the kind of thing I could get on a student’s budget) but I did get to play with them. The description in this article is… very spot on. It was a little hard to explain what it was for, what you could do with it, and why.
There was a flurry of activity in this space on Linux at the time. That flurry of activity had started quite some time before, I think, but it didn’t have that much recognisable commercial backing. The earliest device I remember to have sparked a lot of interest was Sharp’s line of Linux-powered Zaurus PDAs. I drooled over those for years. But NetBSD and Linux were ported to a bunch of other commercial devices, with varying degrees of success (think things like HP Jornadas). I used one of those throughout engineering school, as nobody would ship a real (and rather expensive) graphing calculator to my part of the world, but xmaxima ran okay on… I don’t recall if NetBSD or Linux, but one of them, in any case. It wasn’t a very good experience though. Sharp’s PDAs were definitely better in every regard, but there was no way I could afford one at the time (not that anyone would’ve shipped me one). They were faster, had some real batter life (I made my Jornada useful by rigging a DIY contraption that we’d now call a powerbank to it), and it shipped with some usable applications written with Qtopia.
So there was some precedent but the N770 was just… like nothing anyone had really seen. There were some precedents in terms of form factor: Exilien systems, for example, had some entirely keyboardless devices that came in a vaguely tablet-ish form factor, but I don’t think anyone had seen one of those in Europe and even the handheld PC variant was recognizably a PDA. Or some special-purposed devices, like the Node Explorer, I think it was called, and some… Archos-I-don’t-remember-what-it-was-called, which weren’t exactly general-purpose systems per se (the Node Explorer was a navigator, and the Archos thing was a… video recorder of sorts, I think), but they came with a bunch of “general-purpose” software (note-taking and whatever) and a SDK, and you could run your own apps on them.
There had been some attempts at desktops for devices like these before, too. Matchbox comes to mind. That link is from a Wayback Machine snapshot from 2005. I could swear the project was older than that and it had a different website, but maybe I’m misremembering… However, they didn’t get much traction and they weren’t exactly integrated systems, either. You’d get a nice, PDA-sized launcher, sure – but then you were still going to run
xtermor Evolution or whatever. Maemo was, in this regard, a huge leap forward.I think the world was kind of getting over PDAs by that time. I mean, PDAs were still being made and marketed (I remember a bunch of new, at the time, Acer… or was it Asus? devices that could run Linux) but people were already starting to look for alternatives. Most people could kind of articulate the fact that the palm/hand-held factor was nice, but really awkward to use except as an agenda, minimal email writing and the like.
The iPhone was still two years away (and, along with it, things like OpenMoko) but that didn’t stop people from trying to figure out how to improve the touch model (Palm had really good handwriting recognition of sorts and I think some people tried to bring that over to Linux land, but I can’t quite remember who or with what software; and there was also some… spatial input system of sorts, where you’d drag your pen on the screen towards letters to form up words). And notebook vendors were looking into smaller and smaller form factors – not to the point where they’d make “new” handheld PCs, but netbook would become a thing in about two years’ time.
I remember getting excited about the DEC Itsy in 1999. The Intel StrongARM SA1100! Accelerometers for scrolling! Pure unobtanium, readily identifiable as future tech at the time.
When Plan 9 was ported to the iPaq, they called the architecture (StrongARM, I recall) “bitsy”. I wonder if the Itsy was an inspiration for that name.
I bought an N800 because a friend in the local Linux Linux User group basically peer-pressured me into buying it. It was a neat little device but painfully underpowered and the resistive touchscreen was not fun to use. After I got done with the initial tinkering phase, aside from light web browsing, the killer app for this thing was listening to podcasts because it had wifi and a built-in speaker. Pre-smartphone, on the road, I used to plug the headphone jack into a cassette adapter plugged into the car stereo. Worked fine and pretty decent battery life too.
I briefly owned a Linux-based PDA that was a straight-up PalmPilot knockoff, running on a MIPS(!) CPU. Passive-matrix black-and-grey LCD, something very much like Graffiti handwriting recognition with a flimsy little stylus… I got it cheap on eBay, it was dead stock from a dead startup, in 2004 I think. Never found a use for it.
Maybe you were thinking of Dasher? That was an interesting take on predictive text input. I don’t think it was ever in a commercial product, though. There were a lot of interesting ideas about mobile device UIs before Apple came in and paved the trail that Android immediately followed.
A few years later, the Maemo hardware successor of the N770 eventually got a slide-out keyboard, I think that was the N810. Blackberry was dominant, and there were many serious keyboard phones, although none of them were running “linux” to my knowledge.
Sounds like the Agenda VR3, I still have mine. This was in the Palm Pilot era so they didn’t have connectivity (besides a serial port for syncing). My first connected Linux PDA was a Sharp Zaurus 5500 with a CF wifi card. First time I was able to have ssh and my Emacs session in my pocket.
I had one of those, too. Two in fact. They got stolen from my house. :-(
But you don’t mention the extra you got with a wifi adaptor – a battery life of about 15-20 minutes.
It was clever, but totally useless. With the wifi card in, you couldn’t have external storage any more, so there was very little room left.
I had to check: https://uk.pcmag.com/first-looks/30821/sharp-zaurus-sl-5500
64MB RAM, 16MB flash, and a 320x240 screen. Or rather 240x320 as it was portrait.
The sheer amount of thought and planning that went into the Linux-based Zaurus was shown by the fact that the tiny physical keyboard had no pipe symbol. Bit of a snag on an xNix machine, that.
I think this depended on the type of CF card? I don’t remember mine being nearly that bad. In my rose tinted memories my ssh sessions easily made it through meetings.
I can’t remember what I did for the pipe symbol on the Zaurus but yeah, this sort of thing has been a problem with almost all mobile hardware keyboards ever since. Later on I wrote a small pty wrapper that uses a prefix scheme to send missing characters. It’s possible to do the same with tmux bindings too.
Interesting! Both mine were 2nd hand, given to me by techie mates who’d played with them and got bored and moved on. Maybe their tiny batteries were already on the way out or something.
Fun side-note #1: I do not remember the battery pack looking like this one, though. I feel sure I would have noticed.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Battery-Zaurus-SL-5500-900mAh-Li-ion/dp/B007K0DRIU
Fun side-note #2: both came with Sharp’s original OS, version 1.0. I had an interesting time experimenting with alternative OS builds, new ROMs etc. Things did get a lot better, or at least less bad, after the first release. But the friend who gave me my first unit swore up and down that he’d update the ROM. I can’t see any possible mechanism for flash memory to just revert to earlier contents on its own, though.
With replacement OS images you had to decide how to partition the device’s tiny amount of storage: some as read-only for the OS, some as read-write, some as swap, etc. The allocations were fixed and if you got it wrong you had to nuke and reload.
This would have been much easier if the device had some form of logical volume management, and dynamically-changeable volume sizes.
Which is a thought I also had repeatedly around 2023-2024 when experimenting with OpenBSD. It uses an exceptionally complex partitioning layout, and if you forcibly simplify it, you (1) run up against the limitations of its horribly primitive partitioning tool and (2) reduce the OS’s security.
I have got just barely competent enough with OpenBSD that between writing this in early 2022 and writing this in late 2024, two and a half years later, I went from “struggling mightily just to get it running at all in a VM” to “able with only some whimpering and cursing to get it dual-booting on bare metal with XP64, NetBSD, and 2 Linux distros.”
But it’s still a horrible horrible experience and some form of LVM would make matters massively easier.
Which is odd because I avoid Linux LVM as much as possible. I find it a massive pain when you don’t need it. However, you need it for Linux full-disk encryption, and one previous employer of mine insisted upon that.
In other words: I really dislike LVM, and I am annoyed by Linux gratuitously insisting on it in situations where it should not strictly speaking be needed – but in other OSes and other situations, I have really wanted it, but it wasn’t available.
Yes! Dasher! I remember it coming pre-installed (or at least… easily available?) with some distributions, and I had a friend who ran it on some Compaq thingie.
Probably an IPAQ. I had one of those too, a few years later, when it became cheap. WinCE devices, but linux-friendly.
One of my first real salaries went into an N900.. I still love it . The physical keyboard, the overclocking .. such a cool piece of hardware
This may be the first time I’ve heard Android described not as “sidekick 2.0” but as “repurposed software for cameras”. :D The early to mid zeros were a chaotic time for phones in North America, and I don’t think there was as much European crossover as there is now, so it makes sense that a lot of these NA products must have seemed to come out of nowhere.
In a (very mild) defense of Nokia, it also wasn’t initially obvious that the people buying “data devices” that used cell networks, would actually want to make voice calls on them: phones were for extroverts, data terminals were for nerds. It was really the carriers who started insisting on unified devices.
i had a N770 somewhere and it was just clunky enough to not wanna use very often. At most I just did casual e-mail and web browsing iirc.
It seemed like a great idea though, just slightly under powered for video playback