The Nokia N900
The Nokia N900 is a Linux smartphone released in November 2009, running Maemo 5 Fremantle on a 600 MHz ARM Cortex-A8 with a 3.5in 800×480 resistive touchscreen and a three-row slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and it is the only Maemo device Nokia ever sold with a cellular radio.
It is the device most people mean when they say Maemo, because it was the one that reached ordinary phone shops. Everything before it was a Wi-Fi tablet, as the ordered list at The devices, in order sets out, and everything after it carried a different name.
What the Nokia N900 is
The Nokia N900 is a Debian-based Linux computer with a phone modem attached, sold as a smartphone and marketed by Nokia from its announcement on 27 August 2009. Underneath the Hildon desktop it runs dpkg and apt, ships a terminal, and gives the owner root on their own device without any unlocking step. That is the single fact that separates it from every other phone on sale in 2009.
What distinguishes the N900 from its four siblings is telephony and memory. The tablets before it had no cellular radio at all; the N900 has quad-band GSM and EDGE plus 3G on the 900, 1700 and 2100 MHz bands, which is also why its 3G coverage was patchy on North American networks. It carries 256 MB of RAM backed by 768 MB of swap on internal flash, which Nokia advertised as up to 1 GB of application memory, against the 128 MB of the N800 and N810.
The Nokia N900: release date and the software it shipped with
The release date of the Nokia N900 was November 2009, and the software it shipped with was Maemo 5, codenamed Fremantle. Nokia announced the device on 27 August 2009 and shipped the first units three months later. Fremantle was the first Maemo release designed for fingers rather than a stylus, with four scrollable desktops, a live window switcher that showed running applications as thumbnails, and the Gecko-based MicroB browser with Adobe Flash.
Official firmware ended with PR1.3 in 2010. After that the Community SSU, a volunteer-maintained seasonal update assembled from the same package archives, continued to patch Fremantle for years. Both facts matter to anyone holding an N900: the vendor line stopped at PR1.3, the community line did not.
The Nokia N900: case, screen and input
The case of the Nokia N900 measures roughly 111 x 60 x 18 mm and weighs 181 g, which made it thick and heavy for 2009 and is a direct consequence of the slider mechanism. The body is plastic over a metal frame, with a kickstand on the back, a mechanical lens cover for the camera, and a stylus that slots into the bottom right corner. It is a tablet shape shrunk down rather than a phone shape grown up.
Input comes in three forms: the 3.5in 800×480 resistive touchscreen, the three-row slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and the stylus. Resistive was already the unfashionable choice in 2009, when capacitive multi-touch had arrived elsewhere, but it is what let the N900 run desktop-style interfaces with small targets and accept a stylus for precision. The keyboard slides left and has no number row, so digits sit on a modifier layer.
The Nokia N900: full specifications
The full specifications of the Nokia N900 are set out below, taken from Nokia’s own product specification for the device. Where a figure was never published, this table leaves it out rather than guessing.
| Item | Nokia N900 |
|---|---|
| Announced | 27 August 2009 |
| Released | November 2009 |
| Operating system | Maemo 5 Fremantle, final official firmware PR1.3 |
| Processor | TI OMAP 3430, ARM Cortex-A8 at 600 MHz |
| Graphics | PowerVR SGX530 |
| Memory | 256 MB RAM plus 768 MB swap |
| Storage | 32 GB internal, microSD card slot |
| Display | 3.5in, 800×480, resistive touchscreen |
| Input | Three-row slide-out QWERTY keyboard, stylus, touchscreen |
| Camera | 5 MP Carl Zeiss with dual LED flash, front VGA camera |
| Cellular | Quad-band GSM and EDGE, 3G on 900, 1700 and 2100 MHz |
| Other radios | Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth, A-GPS, FM transmitter and receiver, infrared |
| Battery | BL-5J, 1320 mAh, user replaceable |
| Size and weight | About 111 x 60 x 18 mm, 181 g |
The Nokia N900: battery and battery life
The battery of the Nokia N900 is a BL-5J rated at 1320 mAh, and battery life under real use was the device’s weakest point. A 1320 mAh cell was small even by 2009 standards, and Fremantle kept a full Linux userland awake behind the interface, so heavy browsing or navigation drained it inside a working day. Owners used three standard responses: reduce the number of always-on Telepathy accounts, carry a spare cell, or fit a third-party extended pack.
The BL-5J is user replaceable, which is the practical difference between the N900 and the sealed phones that followed it. Extended batteries with a larger back cover were sold by third parties rather than by Nokia, so their capacities came from the makers and were never independently verified in any published test this reference is aware of. No figure is given here for that reason.
This reference lists no sellers, no prices and no second-hand sources for batteries or any other part.
The Nokia N900: the Linux underneath, and what still runs on it
The Linux underneath the Nokia N900 is a Debian userland on a 2.6 series kernel, with dpkg, apt and the Hildon application framework on top, and several projects outside Nokia still target the hardware. The Application Manager was a front end onto real apt repositories, split into extras, extras-testing and extras-devel, so installing software meant adding a repository rather than visiting a store.
- Maemo Leste continues Maemo on a Devuan base and lists the N900 among its supported devices, alongside hardware Nokia never made such as the Motorola Droid 4 and the PinePhone.
- Community SSU kept the original Fremantle system patched after Nokia’s PR1.3.
- Kali Linux published an ARM image for the N900 in its early releases, following BackTrack, its predecessor, which had an N900 edition of its own.
- Debian and Easy Debian chroots let owners run desktop packages beside the stock system.
Messaging worked the same way. Maemo 5 built its contacts and call interface on Telepathy, so Skype and Google Talk accounts appeared next to phone numbers in the same list. WhatsApp never shipped an official Maemo client, and the gap was filled by community clients rather than by the vendor.
The model number N900 is also used by an unrelated aftermarket car head unit sold under the Ohrex name with GPS navigation. It is not this device. The N900’s own navigation came from its A-GPS receiver and Ovi Maps.
The Nokia N900: what replaced it, and where it sits in the line
What replaced the Nokia N900 was not another Maemo phone. Nokia and Intel had merged Maemo and Moblin into MeeGo under the Linux Foundation in February 2010, and the next device in the lineage, The Nokia N9, shipped in September 2011 running MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan with a capacitive AMOLED and no keyboard. Nokia announced its Windows Phone strategy in February 2011, and no MeeGo successor to the N9 followed. The line then continued outside the company through Mer, Jolla and Sailfish OS.
Placed against its own family, the N900 is the fifth device and the turning point. The Nokia 770 of 2005 established the 800×480 screen and the Debian userland with 64 MB of RAM; the N810 of 2007 added the keyboard and GPS; the N900 added the modem. Against Nokia’s Symbian phones of the same period the contrast is sharper: the N97 of June 2009 had a 640×360 screen and 128 MB of RAM under S60 5th Edition, and the N8 of 2010 paired a 12 MP camera with Symbian^3. Both outsold the N900 comfortably. Neither gave the owner a root shell, an apt archive and a desktop browser engine, which is why the N900 is the one still written about. The platform story around it is at Maemo and the Nokia Linux line.