Messaging and MMS
The Nokia N900 shipped without MMS: Maemo 5 put SMS and instant messaging into a single Conversations thread but never sent a picture message, and MMS arrived only when the community wrote it, first as mkMMS, the first working third-party MMS application for the device, and then as the more widely used fMMS.
That gap is the most quoted fact about the N900 and the most misunderstood. Nokia did not forget MMS; the whole messaging stack on Maemo 5 was built around internet protocols and contact accounts rather than around the operator’s message centre, and the omission followed from the design. What else the platform did and did not include is set out in What you could actually install, and the hardware is described under The Nokia N900.
Conversations, the single thread for SMS and chat
Conversations was the single thread for SMS and chat, and it is the part of Maemo 5 that aged best. One list held every exchange with a person, and inside a conversation an SMS, a Google Talk message and a SIP text sat in the same column in time order, with the transport shown per message rather than per window. Sending picked a transport by availability, so a contact who was online got an instant message and a contact who was not got an SMS.
Contacts worked the same way. A single contact card held a phone number, an XMPP address and a Skype identity, and calling or messaging from that card used whichever the user chose. Nokia integrated Skype and Google Talk at the account level on the N900 at launch in November 2009, which meant an internet call was placed from the same dialler as a cellular one.
Telepathy, the framework underneath
Telepathy was the framework underneath Conversations, and it is why the application could unify anything at all. Telepathy is a freedesktop.org real-time communications framework that separates the interface from the protocols: the user interface talks to a Telepathy connection manager over D-Bus, and each connection manager implements one protocol family. Maemo 5 shipped several, and the catalogues supplied more.
- Gabble carried XMPP, which covered Google Talk and any Jabber server.
- Rakia carried SIP, which covered internet telephony and SIP text.
- Idle carried IRC for users who installed it.
- Haze bridged libpurple, which brought the Pidgin protocol set including MSN, ICQ, AIM and Yahoo.
Adding a protocol therefore meant installing a package, not replacing the messaging application, and that is the mechanism every later addition to N900 messaging used.
Why MMS was missing, and what mkMMS and fMMS did
MMS was missing because sending one requires the parts Maemo 5 did not implement: a connection to the operator’s MMS centre over a separate access point, the WAP encoding that message uses, and handling for the notification SMS that announces an incoming message. Nokia never added it, in any of the four Maemo 5 firmware updates, and the final one, PR1.3, closed in October 2010 with the gap still open.
The community closed it in two stages. mkMMS was the first working third-party MMS application on the platform and proved the operator side could be spoken to from Maemo at all. fMMS followed and became the one most owners actually installed, handling both sending and receiving through the device’s own connection settings, distributed as a package through the community catalogues in the ordinary way. Neither was ever folded into the system by Nokia.
This site records that these applications existed. It hosts no packages, no repackaged applications and no firmware, and it is an independent reference rather than Nokia, Jolla, maemo.org or the original Maemo Freak blog.
WhatsApp on the N900, and on Nokia’s Symbian phones
WhatsApp on the N900 was never official: WhatsApp Inc. released no client for Maemo 5, and the only WhatsApp on the device was a third-party client written by volunteers, of which Yappari was the one most N900 owners used. Those clients spoke the protocol as it existed then, and they stopped working when WhatsApp retired the older protocol and tightened registration, which no third-party client could follow.
Nokia’s Symbian phones had the opposite history. WhatsApp did publish an official Symbian client, so an N8 ran WhatsApp for years, until WhatsApp’s own end-of-support notices retired Symbian S60 in 2017 and Nokia’s Series 40 at the end of 2018. The N900 never had that client at all, so the honest answer to whether it supports WhatsApp is no, and it never did.
The N900 next to the N97 and the N8
The N900 next to the N97 and the N8 is a comparison between one Linux device and two Symbian ones, and messaging is where the difference shows most clearly. The Symbian pair sent MMS out of the box and ran the official WhatsApp client; the N900 did neither, and got both from third parties or not at all. In exchange the N900 unified SMS with internet chat in one thread, which neither Symbian device did.
| Feature | Nokia N97 | Nokia N900 | Nokia N8 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Released | June 2009 | November 2009 | 2010 |
| Operating system | Symbian S60 5th Edition | Maemo 5 | Symbian^3 |
| Display | 3.5in 640×360 resistive | 3.5in 800×480 resistive | 3.5in 640×360 capacitive AMOLED |
| Hardware keyboard | Slide-out QWERTY | Slide-out three-row QWERTY | None |
| MMS from the factory | Yes | No | Yes |
| Official WhatsApp client | Yes, until Symbian support ended | No, never | Yes, until Symbian support ended |
| Cellular data | 3G, no LTE | 3G, no LTE | 3G with HSDPA, no LTE |
No device in that table has 4G. All three predate Nokia shipping LTE handsets, so an N8 connects at 3G speeds at best, and only where a 3G network still exists. The keyboard is the other axis: the N97 and the N900 both had one, and on the N900 it mattered more, because the same physical keys served the messaging application and the terminal.
What still works, and what stopped
What still works on these devices is limited by the networks rather than by the software. The messaging stack itself is intact on a working N900: Conversations opens, SMS is sent through the modem, and an XMPP account still connects if the server accepts the old ciphers. What stopped is everything that depended on a service: the third-party WhatsApp clients, the presence services that closed, and the accounts whose providers moved on.
The networks are the harder limit. These are 3G devices with 2G fallback, and operators in many countries have switched off one or both, which takes calls and SMS with them regardless of what the handset can do. Nokia discontinued all three phones years ago and none is sold new; this reference carries no prices, no listings and no accessories or battery sourcing, only the record of what the devices did. The other half of that record, the applications that made the platform worth using, runs from The Ovi Store through to Maps and navigation.