German hackers try to revive a dead Nokia and make it the first 'open' phone
The Nokia smartphone name is dead, but it may live on as a German zombie. A team of German hackers want to revive the Nokia N900. They want to tear out its motherboard and give it a new, more powerful, and more open-source one instead. They’re calling it Neo900.
The Nokia N900 is a bit of a legend. It was one of Nokia’s open-platform smartphones released back in 2009, and ran Nokia’s self-made OS, Maemo, which it later abandoned. Joerg Reisenweber, a fan of the N900 and smartphone hacker, still thinks the device has some life left in it. Joerg is teaming up with the folks behind Open Source Phone Developer OpenMoko to help raise enough funds to design and prototype a new motherboard upgrade for the N900 that offers a faster processor, more RAM, but with all the goodness of the N900.
The new phone, the Neo900, would pretty much be just like a N900 on the outside, but on the inside it’d have a brand new GTA04 motherboard, 1GHZ processor, up to 1GB of RAM, and up to 64GB of internal storage. This is done by taking the latest OpenMoko motherboard and designing it to integrate with the rest of the N900′s hardware. The original N900 had 256MB of RAM, a 600MHZ processor, and a shockingly large 32GB of storage. It sounds like a sort of crazy smartphone transplant, but it can really work.
