I still have an N800-tough, it still works. It even holds a five day charge. This is from after the reboot, it runs linux and so far it has been ultra reliable. I have an older one as well that still works but this one is just a little more useful (it can serve as a wifi access point).

On the software side there is an Argentinian (I believe) artist who actively uses blender on Nokia N95s, you can even connect a projector to it. Absolutely blew my mind when I saw it.

https://blenderartists.org/t/blendersito-is-a-blender-clone-...

Nokia was so cool, before Android only SoCs swamped everything and it became impossible to run normal upstream Linux stack on phones because no one provides open drivers for a whole bunch of stuff.

Yes, the alternative universe had Nokia board not hired Elop.

N810, N900, N9 owner here.

Good read. I did the exact same modification to my N900; it was my internet router for several years. In those days, a mobile carrier in my country offered a relatively cheap data plan for dumb phones: unlimited data, but restricted internet connectivity with a WAP proxy. Fortunately, thanks to curl and busybox utils, I figured out that the proxy allowed CONNECT requests, and a tiny C program on my N900 was able to transparently tunnel all TCP connections to the internet.

BTW, my N900 had another mod: it featured a Type-A female port :)

N900 remains the best phone I've ever owned. Learnt so much with it.

I had one of these around 2011! Used it to host a websocket server - a novelty at the time - during a conference talk, and it held up to 30+ clients before dying.

Oh I miss this era of early smartphones. My life for a physical slide out keyboard on the iPhone.

N9000 was so ahead of it's time.

There is so much love for the n900 and the n950.

Yet still there is not true successor, although I would expect that producing things like this became cheaper in the recent years.