I was big into dumbphones about 10-15 years ago and the problem with dumbphones is the same problem with dumbtv and other ones, is that the market is already small, and those in the market for these things are opinionated as shit about the specific configuration they want. So you are presented probably with maybe 2, 3 viable options if you are lucky, none are the thing that satisfies your actual needs, and they are all overpriced as shit because they have no competition because the market is so niche. So you probably end up buying the closest configuration possible to what you want and then spend your experience being slightly annoyed that it’s not fully there.

As Nokia Alumni, I would be happy with a Symbian Belle device like the C7 instead, but get the feeling, N95 was quite good as well.

> I would jump on a modern N95

Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5.

Have you checked the fair phone?

SIP over Wi-Fi was so amazing on Symbian. Free international phone calls over Eduroam long before mobile Skype was a thing!

That's actually a very interesting idea - do you have any good resources for setting this up ?

There are some cars that can only access 3G for certain features and it would be cool to test around and see what my vehicle can do and if I want to disable it for reliability reasons

802.11b/g :(

> OpenBTS/YateBTS/OsmoBTS and friends are useful here to spin up a working network and relive a happier time.

Indeed, but good luck setting something like that up and not upset a legitimate cell tower or other user of a frequency band that can be spoken by LTE equipment.

The FxTec Pro 1 is the closest I've found these days; it has a slied-out keyboard and an unlocked bootloader so you can run LineageOS or Ubuntu Touch (PMOS support seems spotty).

The keyboard isn't as nice as those on phones from ~2010; it's a bit too big for the thumbs to really fly and sliding it in & out is not as effortless as it should be, but nless you count Unihertz's blackberry-likes, there's really nothing else around that comes close!

This with DisplayPort Alt-Mode so it can be docked for desktop use is pretty much my dream device.

I'd buy an N810 formfactor right now with modern guts.

Not ARM but checkout the PinePhone, its also pretty much sold at cost (same as most Pine products)

Funny I tried to buy one of those breakout blackberry keyboards but they were sold out everywhere

I loved the n900 daily from mid-late 2010 to ~mid-2012. Text editor on "Debian". "Desktop" Firefox. Terminal. Maps. Some decent other apps: a good drawing app that I used on the train a lot for whiteboarding.

I liked Maemo 5. Having never used the n810 nor Maemo 4, I suppose didn't know what I was missing.

iPhone did not get copy-paste until mid-2009!

Eventually my n900's microSD jack broke off the board, which I've read was common.

And their 5 year old iPhone can run a game that looks a hell of a lot better than Half-Life on 320x240@30 FPS too. Just listing that the hardware is different than the other doesn't give a comparison. Was there really not a shittily made app for the N95 at all? Are there really not apps that perform well on a 5 year old iPhone?

We're just looking at a single app optimized for a platform nearly 2 decades after release and somehow concluding people don't ever optimize software these days. Some software is always going to be inefficient as can be but there is more well optimized software available now than there ever has been.

64MB RAM on the Nokia N95.

Isn't that because a lot of GoldSrc was idTech-derived enough that the legality of open sourcing it is trapped in contract law limbo? Even though those years of the idTech engine itself are now also open source, the contracts at the time did not plan for that and it is likely at this point that solving those contracts would be a 3-way legal question between Microsoft (ActiVision because of Vivendi/Sierra, Half-Life's original publisher), Microsoft (Bethesda because of inheriting idTech), and Valve, with the obviously problem in the way of that Valve and Microsoft have a complex history and aren't likely to want to get into a legal discussion if they can help it.

I seem to recall a fan project trying to take idTech's open source and recreate GoldSrc's fork from it by trying to reverse engineer from the parts of Half Life that are open source but not having much luck because the divergence was strong enough in some places to be somewhat impenetrable without some other Rosetta Stone.

There was also the very early leak/theft of the Half-Life 2 beta source (https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Half-Life_2_leak)

What scripting system?

And it was based on Debian. Installing an "app" was quite literally installing a deb package. Back in the day, I was working at a mobile software company and they had to call the IT guy (i.e. me) to explain how packaging works in Debian, just for the new Nokia they sent us, about a month before official launch. I tought the gadget was adorable.

Might as well skip to Crysis at this rate.

I did the same, I do wonder if it holds up as well as my memory remembers. Probably not.

Like I remember Doom running fine on my 486 SX 25Mhz, but looking back at it now, it wasn't that great. It took a top end Pentium to really get it into smooth-ish 20fps+ territory.

Yeah, I get why people want it to be smooth but when you hear somethings I do wonder if folks could be a little more patient.

"My game froze for 100ms on a one time shader compilation dropping... totally unplayable!"

I get it, shader compilation is a little pain point but it isn't that bad. Some compilation times are less than the frame times we used to play at in the 80's/90's.

With a Voodoo I assume you could get it up to 30fps fairly comfortably but they still weren't the most common back then.

Still remember the concern when Quake 3 would require a GPU as they were not entirely ubiquitous then. It was the right more and it helped the industry forward but it was a little pain point at that time.