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Nokia N900 Linux Smartphone Running OS X

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the mr-johnson's-dog dept.

Rovaani writes "There is a video floating around of a Nokia N900 smartphone running the full desktop Mac OS X 10.3. From the author, Tomi Nikkanen: 'I believe this makes the N900 the first smartphone ever to run a full version of Mac OS X (at any speed, slow or otherwise). As you can see from the heavily edited video, it took almost 2 hours to reach the "About my Mac..." window. Keep your eye on the time display as that will give you an impression of just how uselessly slow it is.'"

10 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Not useless by Renegade+Lisp · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Maybe uselessly slow, yes, but this is the kind of tinkering that any device should allow if it is to be called a computer.

    There's a direct link to a free information society from these kinds of experiments -- something that is very much endangered by the current trend towards unmodifiable devices and appifization.

  2. Re:Useless commentary by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    OS X 10.3 was PowerPC-only. The N900 has an ARM CPU. The 'uselessly slow' commentary comes from the fact that it's running in an emulator (QEMU? I didn't RTFA), so it's not like the phone is running the OS, the phone is running the emulator and the emulator is running the OS. Remember the people running PowerPC OS X emulated on P3/P4 CPUs before the first Intel release? It's going to be even slower than that.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. Love It by LearnToSpell · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I hate to sound like the eternal nuthugger, but I'm having so much fun with my N900. Just threw on the cifs-mounting stuff, and that combined (alternated, really) with sshfs means I can take my entire music collection wherever I go. 1.5TB, ripped to flac on a server in my basement, so why would I want to have to choose what albums I take with me to the gym or work or wherever? Just mount the thing and play. Plus, there's an FM transmitter built-in, so I can just plunk it down next to (~15 feet) a radio, and fire it up.

    The "it's so slow" comments are kind of silly. This is obviously a POC, and a pretty nice one. Any phone that can run Asterisk, Apache, nmap and OSX is cool in my book. :)

    --
    Haida Manga
    1. Re:Love It by roju · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I've read that WIND uses the right frequencies to use the N900 at 3G speeds. Apparently they may even be bringing it to Canada officially. People are running it right now though, just self-imported from the States.

    2. Re:Love It by Verdatum · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Should we blame Nokia? Should we blame the telcos? Or should we blame the standards organization, ISO? NO! Blame Canada! Blame Canada! (and so on)

    3. Re:Love It by IgnoramusMaximus · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Actually the "blame" for the different band allocation lies with history. Many frequencies were allocated to different services in Europe and North America, some of these services having not existed in one place or another. When the advent of cellular phones came about, the companies got what was available at the moment. The European HDSPA (aka 3G) bands were used by different things in the USA and Canada and so different bands were allocated. This of course keeps changing as some older services become obsolete and some new bands become available for other uses.

  4. Re:Somewhat ironic by fredmosby · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The iPhone and iPad run the multi-touch version of OSX. Calling it the 'iPhone OS' is poor marketing on Apple's part, but it really is full OSX with a different (better in terms of usability) interface.

  5. complain to Congress by pydev · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That's not Nokia's fault. In order to cover the US market, they would have to offer different versions for AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint. Each of those versions would require separate FCC approval. And the reason for that mess is because the FCC and Congress have failed to set standards for mobile telecommunications.

    That's one of the many reasons the US mobile market is so terribly backwards and overpriced: there is no competition, and monopolies are enforced through technology.

    1. Re:complain to Congress by Miamicanes · · Score: 5, Interesting

      > Each of those versions would require separate FCC approval.

      Not quote. There's no technical reason why a single phone approved by the FCC couldn't be used on both Sprint and Verizon, or on AT&T and T-Mobile... it's mainly the carriers' fault.

      Basically, the FCC requires any phone with unique hardware and radio firmware to be tested & approved. Sprint won't allow its customers to use Verizon-branded phones, and Verizon won't sell phones that aren't built to be "Uniquely Verizon". Thus, it would almost be beyond pointless for a manufacturer to pay to get FCC approval for a generic CDMA phone, because Sprint wouldn't allow it to be used, and Verizon wouldn't buy a million of them to resell to its customers.

      The AT&T/T-Mobile situation is a little blurrier. It appears that right now, AT&T has a company policy of refusing to sell phones capable of 1700/2100 UMTS, and T-Mobile has a company policy of refusing to sell phones capable of 850MHz UMTS. Neither company will actually stop a customer from buying one himself and sticking the SIM card into it, but the market (right now) for unsubsidized handsets in the US is somewhere between "barely relevant" and "all but nonexistent". As a practical matter, there are exactly two American customers that manufacturers like HTC, Samsung, Nokia, and Motorola care about: AT&T and T-Mobile.

      Need more proof of corporate policy dictating handset frequency availability? Watch the FCC submissions logs. I can almost guarantee that there will be two distinct versions of the iPhone 4 submitted to the FCC -- one that does 850MHz and 1900/2100 UMTS, and one that does 1700/2100 and 1900/2100. What's really sad is that they'll both probably have the same hardware, and differ only in their radio firmware. It'll suck for everyone... Europeans will have to decide whether they'd rather roam on AT&T or T-Mobile when they visit the US, and American iPhones will effectively be locked to AT&T or T-Mobile -- at least, for anyone buying one to use in the US with 3G data.

    2. Re:complain to Congress by Miamicanes · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, there's one problem with REQUIRING both 850 and 1700/2100 -- it costs more to make a phone capable of doing both. From what I've read, at worst, the only difference between a phone built for 1700/2100 and a phone built for 1900/2100 is a few passive component values determined at build time. At best, it's purely a matter of firmware and regulatory approval. On the other hand, a phone that does BOTH 850MHz *and* 1700&|1900/2100 needs two radio subsystems.

      Going purely by engineering cost-benefit and completely disregarding matters of politics, the most sensible compromise would probably be for the FCC to require that any phone capable of 1900/2100UMTS *also* be capable of 1700/2100UMTS. As a practical matter, it would affect mainly AT&T and Apple. AT&T, because international compatibility is one of their selling points, so most of their phones support 850 and 1900/2100. Apple, because their phones have to work with AT&T and also work outside the US.

      To keep things fair for AT&T, the FCC could try to come up with some rule that basically says, "If you make a phone that does 850MHz plus 1700/1900/2100, then turn around and try to disable the 850MHz via software or the omission of literally a few cents worth of passive components, it won't be approved". The problem is defining it in a way that would prevent a company like HTC from trivially disabling 850MHz support just to pacify T-Mobile, but wouldn't require that 850Mhz support be added to a handset that otherwise has no reason to support it. It's kind of like defining porn... any halfwit can look at something blatant, like a circuit board with missing components and a chipset spec'ed to do 850 and realize that something's rotten in Denmark, but it becomes a serious judgment call if eliminating those components genuinely enables some kind of improvement.

      As for Sprint-vs-Verizon, THEIR forced incompatibility is just stupid. All the FCC would need to do in THAT case is prohibit Sprint from refusing to activate non-Sprint phones, and require both Sprint and Verizon to support phones with R-UIM cards. It wouldn't even have to go so far as to require that Sprint & Verizon sell phones that use R-UIM cards... just require that they allow otherwise-compatible phones that use them, and require that they sell the cards to customers who want to buy them. Knowing Sprint & Verizon, at first they'd probably charge $999 per R-UIM card or require a 10 year contract to get one. In the long run, neither Sprint nor Verizon really want to support them, but if they were both forced to do it, eventually they'd start using them to compete with each other. For now, they're still enjoying the final months of a decade-long data duopoly. With a little luck, by this time next year, T-Mobile will be a viable alternative to them in most parts of the US.