For many people, the smartphone era began when the first Apple iPhones and Android devices hit the market, but the smartphone itself can be traced back to an IBM device almost twenty years earlier. In fact, in the few years before the birth of today’s platforms, many people had smartphones without quite realizing what they had because Nokia, the market leader in the 2000s, failed to make their Symbian platform easy to use in the way Apple did. The N8 was their attempt at producing an iPhone competitor, but the lack of an app store on the device and that atrocious Windows-based installation system meant it would be their last mass-market flagship before falling down the Microsoft Windows Phone rabbit hole.
In the video below the break he takes a pair of N8s and assembles one with that beautiful camera fully working, before installing the new ROM and giving it a spin. We finally get to see what the N8 could have been, but wasn’t, as it gets Nokia’s latest Symbian release, and the crucial missing app store. Even fifteen years later it’s a very slick device, enough to make us regret that this ROM won’t be made for the earlier N-series that sits in a drawer where this is written. We salute the developers for keeping the N8 alive.
Strangely enough, this isn’t the only Nokia from that era to get some 2020s love.
#Symbian #Nokia #lives