Where the “smart phone” remained a computer

I came up through a different era of computing — not a better one, just one where the abstractions were thinner and the plumbing was closer to the surface. Sometimes there were no abstractions at all. Tools like fdisk might as well have been rites of passage: nobody understood them completely, but you learned just enough to avoid catastrophe.

That was the apprenticeship. A blinking cursor, a visible filesystem, and the knowledge that a single typo could ruin your afternoon. I learned just enough autoexec.bat and config.sys voodoo to play Ultima VII. The software of the time — especially games — made you learn how memory managers, drivers, and TSRs interacted. You learned to account for edge cases because the edge cases were everywhere. “Creating an Ultima VII boot floppy” was systems thinking before I had the language for it.

I was more fortunate than most: I had a computer I could break. The worst thing at risk was a saved game or some school homework. That freedom mattered. It meant experimentation was safe. It meant the machine could be rebuilt. It meant the system was something you could touch. I still had to make sure I didn’t break it permanently — it was my father’s hard‑earned money, after all — but in every other respect I was only accountable to myself. Everyone eventually had an rm -rf or format a: mishap. Mine involved wiping a directory I absolutely shouldn’t have, then spending an entire afternoon rebuilding the OS and the applications while pretending that was the plan all along. That was part of the learning curve: the quiet panic, the improvisation, the relief when the machine finally booted again.

There were people — and I was one of them — who wanted to understand more, to shape the machine rather than just use it. Sometimes out of curiosity, sometimes out of necessity. That instinct didn’t disappear. It simply moved. Today, the people who think this way are writing Dockerfiles, orchestrating Kubernetes clusters, and automating infrastructure with Ansible. The tools changed. The mindset didn’t.

What did change was the mainstream computing environment. Modern devices are polished, sealed, and frictionless. They’re designed to protect users from themselves, and while that’s often the right choice, it can be frustrating when you know exactly what you’re trying to do and the system insists on intervening. And the stakes are higher now: a mistake isn’t a lost save file — it’s a wiped photo library or a compromised identity. The cost of curiosity went up.

Android 15 QPR2 was what brought all this back to the surface. When Google quietly added a real Linux terminal — not a toy shell, not a themed command prompt, but an honest‑to‑goodness terminal with access to the underlying system — it felt like a tiny crack in the sealed‑appliance world. A reminder of what it was like when mobile devices still behaved like computers. It wasn’t the same, of course. The modern ecosystem is too layered, too protected, too mediated. But that moment, that glimpse of a terminal on a mainstream phone, was enough to stir the memory of a different paradigm. The one the N900 embodied so naturally.

This is why devices like the Nokia N900 feel like they belong to a different lineage. The N900 didn’t demand technical depth; it simply didn’t hide the depth that was already there.

I still remember the first time I held it. It felt like I had the future in my hands — not the future we ended up with, but the future that could have been. It was small, dense, slightly awkward, and absolutely alive. A machine that trusted you enough to let you break it.

And that future still has caretakers. Even now, there are people repairing N900s, reflowing boards, machining replacement hinges, and jury‑rigging parts from other devices just to keep them alive. The hardware invites it because it was built like a computer, not an appliance. You get a community like that because they feel the forgotten future too. They recognise the path the industry didn’t take, and they’re keeping a small piece of it alive with their own hands. And the N900 still receives community‑driven updates in 2025. That longevity says something. You don’t keep a device alive for sixteen years unless the hardware invites it and the philosophy behind it resonates with a certain kind of user.

There was also the developer‑only N950 — effectively the next step in the lineage, but released in quantities so small they might as well be roc’s teeth. I’ve never even seen one, never mind touched. And yet from the photos and the accounts of the few who held it, the N950 looked beautiful — more refined, more mature, the natural evolution of the paradigm. A device that proved the idea wasn’t a fluke. It’s the kind of hardware that becomes myth by accident: a glimpse of a future that never made it to market.

The well‑received N9, the successor to the N900, abandoned the physical keyboard. It was a gorgeous device — elegant, fluid, unmistakably modern — but it marked a shift in philosophy. Even though it ran MeeGo, you could feel the lineage drifting away. It was also impossible to ignore the market gravity the original iPhone had created a few years earlier. Touch‑first design had become the expectation, not the experiment. The N900 treated the keyboard as part of the computer it was; the N9 treated the phone as an object of pure design. It wasn’t wrong, but it was different. And it signaled that the paradigm was already slipping out of reach.

Younger users today are extraordinarily fluent in modern ecosystems — far more so than I am. They navigate platforms, workflows, and UX patterns with an ease that’s genuinely impressive. Their literacy lives in a different layer, shaped by the systems they grew up with.

But some of us still remember what it felt like when the bones were visible. When the system trusted you. When breaking things was part of the process. And when a device like the N900 made perfect sense.

Seeing a terminal return to a modern phone made me realise how much that old paradigm still lives somewhere in me. The N900 wasn’t just a device; it was a glimpse of a future that made sense — a future where the smart phone remained a computer. Maybe that’s why people still repair them, still keep them alive. They’re holding on to a future we once touched, briefly, before the industry turned away.