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Nokia N900 Linux Smartphone Running OS X
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.'"
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.
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
> 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.