Do you remember Nokia phones, with their Symbian OS? Dead and gone, you might think, but even they have dedicated enthusiasts here in 2026. Some of them have gone so far as to produce a new ROM for the daddy of Symbian phones, the Nokia N8, and [Janus Cycle] is giving it a spin.
For many people, the smartphone era began when the first Apple iPhones and Android devices reached the market, but the smartphone itself can be traced back almost two decades earlier to an IBM device. In the few years before the birth of today’s platforms many people even had smartphones without quite realizing what they had, because Nokia, the market leader in the 2000s, failed to make their Symbian platform user friendly in the way that Apple did. The N8 was their attempt to produce an iPhone competitor, but its lack of an on-device app store and that horrific 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 get to see at last what the N8 could have been but wasn’t, as it gains the last Symbian release from Nokia, and the crucial missing app store. Even fifteen years later it’s a very slick device, enough to make us sorry that this ROM won’t be made for the earlier N-series sitting in a drawer where this is being written. We salute its developers for keeping the N8 alive.
Oddly, this isn’t the only Nokia from that era that’s received a little 2020s love.
Just small correction, Nokia N8 had Ovi/Nokia Store, same as most previous Symbian or S40 models back to N95 from 2006, they started it under the name Ovi Store around 2009.
Correct and Nokia also launched the 808pureview long after the N8, and at least half a dozen machines between them. The article is perhaps could do with a tad more research.
I still have one, but no proprietary charger to turn it on. I truly believe from a hardware standpoint there has never been and intentionally will never be a better phone for its time. That chassis hurt reception a tad but when it worked on every. single. network. i could live with that
I take exception to this. I was there, I lusted after a Pureview 808.
But lovely as it was, it wasn’t a flagship phone, and neither were the other Symbian machines. It was a high-end niche phone. By then the flagship Nokia models were Microsoft based.
Excuse me while I laugh uncontrollably.
Correct. Ovi store was a store in name.
A store like the Apple app store though, it wasn’t. As with so many things Nokia, they almost got it right, but missed the point.
The point with Symbian was a little different – it shouldn’t have needed an app-store because you could just get your apps directly from their vendors. It was more “PC-like” in that respect.
Another difference was that US and other international carriers wanted to lock the phones down, so they could sell “features” in the form of pre-loaded apps and options. That was part of the deal to get the phones on the market, because in most markets the carriers sold the phones as a bundle with the plan and Nokia had to compromise with that. It was the carriers who didn’t understand what a smartphone is, so they told Nokia not to step on their toes.
Apple didn’t cut any such deals – though the iPhone didn’t have an appstore or downloadable apps on launch either, and it was an AT&T monopoly special. The appstore came later.
When the iPhone came around, it was still 2G/EDGE and it was slooooow as heck to download anything, and extremely expensive considering the data plans available. It was barely usable for accessing the web, and mostly relied on the wow-factor of being the first modern touch screen only phone. It really wasn’t a smartphone on launch, but a very fancy dumb feature phone.
The app store launched when the iPhone 3G was launched, but at that point it was still a “strategic partnership” with AT&T and you paid thousands of dollars for the plan, to be able to access the app store. It was the feature they were selling.
Nokia’s Ovi Store wasn’t supposed to be tied to any carrier, which is why all the carriers rejected the idea and wanted Nokia to step back and let them handle the business, like AT&T did with the iPhone.
NOKIA X6 WAS A.LEGEND
To me, one of the first smartphones was the Nokia Communicator of the mid-90s.
It was much more sophisticated than the iPhone in terms of ergonomics and productivity.
It could do fax, e-mail, had an internal modem, had a keyboard and could be operated both like a handheld PC and cellphone, as needed.
By contrast, the iPhone was anti-design, anti-usability. It was basic, an electric pocket mirror.
It had no intelligent handwriting recognition, no external antenna port, no serial port etc.
The Blackberry already was much better than the iPhone in most tasks, I think.
As an ex-Nokian, I mostly agree. But maybe the iPhone was ergonomically better. The first Communicators were not exactly pocket size. 9230 perhaps.
Sorry, meant the 9300 or 9300i (Mini and Minimi)
Give me my meego
Yup, my n9 was the best phone I’ve ever had
Got the maemo qwerty loaner through developer program and I’d happily use it for the rest of my life if there just were necessary apps available.
Sorry meego. N950.
Agreed! As in human nature, every man tries to outwit the most handsome one, and derives sadistic pleasure by doing so. Lol
The form factor of a N8 is amazing (way better than gigantic smartphones we currently have). Too bad the armhf architecture is so old than projects like PostmarketOS are dropping it because it would make for an hell of small Linux device
Man I miss one-hand smartphones. My Wildfire S had 3,5″ screen but I made less mistakes when typing.
Have a look at the iKKO Mind One Pro.
In practice, i actually enjoyed developing for the Psion EPOC OS. But every one of their technical decisions was awful. A bespoke garbage dialect of C++. Seems like Symbian went to Qt, which is a different truly awful dialect of C++. They still use moc!?? Just astonishing that you would recognize that C++ is so awful that you need to reinvent virtual functions with your own custom pre-processor, and yet still use C++. Say what you want about Java but many-many people have managed to make comprehensive and popular and well-supported and long-lasting GUI frameworks in it, but every single C++ GUI framework is a disaster zone.
The only ancient mobile OS i actually miss is PalmOS. It was very well-tailored for the size of the hardware it ran on. And, at the tasks it was capable of, it was much faster in 2001 than Android is today. And better battery life too. Can’t imagine going back to it given how important the browser is today, but i still admire it in hindsight. I had a PalmOS smart phone (SPH-i300) in 2005 which served to highlight both how incredibly limited early smartphones were (why Android/Apple were able to eat their market once it was technologically viable), and also how poorly PalmOS aged into higher-spec devices. One day it crashed (again) while i was trying to answer a phone call and i said “you will never do that to me again” and smashed it to pieces with the nearest hand tool.
PalmOS was fun! Too bad Handspring was involved in the creation of the iPhone, maybe.
If I understand correctly, the Handspring guys approached Jobs and demoed a Handspring Visor with the 2G add-on module.
As a former Visor user this makes me sad. If only that didn’t happen. 😢
I went the Nokia and Android route when the iPhones came out and always thought using one was like going back to the handspring .. this might explain that then!
not quite ancient but definetly forgotten to time, did you ever use the blackberry z10? it was the closest ive ever used to how i instinctivly want to use a smart….. something. ive always wanted something minority report style and the gesture based os seemed like a real step towards it at the time
MEEGO!!!!
Exactly, this was the true opportunity that Nokia failed on! It started with Maemo, the first open source mobile OS and the N900 as an alternative to Symbian.
“Nothing beats the nostalgia of old-school Nokia. The 1100, 6303i, N-Gage, and 6600 were the epitome of robust engineering and creative design. I have such fond memories of these well-built classics and truly hope for a Nokia revival.”
This article encouraged me to go find my Nokia C6 and look for a way to roll-back the horrible microsoft virus that caused me to stop using the device. Wish me luck!
That! Was a waste of time. My C6-01 was dead. Display a field of colorful sparkles. Disassembly, connector cycle and reassembly… still junk. Again, an attempt to live in the past failed. So there is some good here, I’m not going to waste the afternoon trying to undo a microwrong from 15 years ago. At least my MiniDisc player still works :-)
I was using a Series 90 phone for years before either Android or iPhone existed. When people started saying that Apple invented the smartphone… I started thinking people are crazy.
The only innovations I saw in those so-called first smartphones…
The marketplace / store.
That’s not so innovative. Linux had package managers forever already.
Oh.. but there are nice descriptions, ratings and the opportunity to buy/sell licenses? Lindows had that already.
Or was the innovation to do away with the keyboard and use the whole face for screen?
That’s an innovation of pretty dubious quality. No touch screen has ever been as good to type on as decent buttons. My S90 only had a T9 keyboard so yah, full screen touch would have been better. But there were those clamshell phones that unfolded and had a keyboard under the screen. Way better than what we have today even!
The trick was the marketing, especially to the likes of the BBC. The BBC still go on about apple being the first smartphone even though it was certainly not
The only innovation was clever marketing. They pushed it more like a fashion accessory than a phone and capitalised on FOMO.
…and what made their app-store practical for the Apple iPhone was 3G data being available in 2007, meaning you didn’t have time to make a cup of tea between starting a download and it finishing, like with the earlier Nokia phones (eg: 3330 and 3350) using the OVI Store had with a glacially slow GPRS/2.5G/WAP data connection which was all which was available in 2002.
Nope. 2008. The first iPhone was 2G only.
Many thanks to the developers of this ROM!! My Nokia is the original N95 (not the black 8 GB version). So I rushed over to ebay to buy a N8. The only one for sale was a phone from Australia. I am in the US so the power supply would not fit the electrical outlets in my country. BTW, I saw a Reddit post a while back saying that my N95 would still make phone calls in Belize. Can anyone confirm that? If you have a N8 for sale, let me know! I am so glad older Nokia phones are getting some love.
I wish Nokia phones and Symbian operating systems will re-emerge with their unending capabilities and friendly UI not excluding the battery strength.
I am not a developer, I was an early user of xda due to the use of windows phones. I thunk I had a Siemens and other phones running windows with apps in as early as 2001. It synced with my PC, which meant I could have everything the same across devices…. the iPhone went backwards…..
I had multiple Nokia N Series phones and an E Series phone, the biggest issue was that apps were mostly custom to each device and, even if I found the same app, the UI would be different for each device. Having a custom UI for each device, or even each screen resolution, would require much more effort and that’s why I think Android won, it caused less friction for third party developers. This was also an issue on Palm, neither of these companies had a developer focused design for their OS and it cost them.
I will always argue that Nokia phones were built with the mindset of how do we create a customer based phone. This is why they made phones that you never worried that you broke it when you dropped it, or even get so mad that you threw it at your car dash and it end up in the back seat and all you would have to do is put the battery and back cover back on — that seemed like too specific of a scenario, anyways — that’s why Nokia is still remembered, and memed about, as the phone you had to worry about damaging what you threw it at instead of the phone itself.
At the time camera bumps were a flaw since it took away from the minimal look every company was chasing. Now camera bumps are in fashion and almost every phone has a camera bump.
In Past time, nokia phone was too good in feature and small size.
If nokia continue the old model without any changes and provide present time software and features then nokia company work definitely.
I have my Windows Lumia 830 live and running perfectly to this date.
Do you remember Nokia phones, with their Symbian OS?
i do, and the fact that i do is the reason i don’t really want to use that os again
Ever seen the beautiful N900 ??? The live wallpaper itself is still like a fresh thing for me atleast.. forget iphone, this N900 was connecting to TV , PC, Wifi router , Fridge , Washing machine, AC etc etc… Still missing the old era of phones .
N9 and N900 was it for me in those days, later on the sailfish OS, miss the quality phones of these times, thnx goes out for the devs of these masterpieces.
I never owned the N8 but I have been a Nokia fan since 1996.
I still own (and regularly use) my trusty old Nokia X2-00
My Nokia 6300, Nokia Lumia 720, Nokia Lumia 735, Nokia Lumia 620 and Nokia 7.2, still work just fine.
Meego is better than android..I!
I have it all This Type of Mobiles
I loved my N8 and 808 PureView. I still remember being in awe that I could connect a mouse and keyboard to them with the USB2Go feature. Still, the N9 running MeeGo was a way better UI experience and I wish they went in that direction instead of Windows Phone OS
why? they didn’t even change/upgrade/buffed the OS. still the outdated version it always is. so.. why?
N8 was the first without a keyboard? Wasn’t that the 5800 Xpressmusic?
Nokia? Sony Ericsson was killing the Symbian game with the Sony Ericsson P800. I was searching the net while others were still playing ‘snake’
I worked for Texas Instruments in the mid 2000s. I had the opportunity to work with Nokia engineers on Symbian and Meego/Maemo projects. I think they were some of the best people I’ve ever worked with. I really enjoyed my trip to Finland. I attribute all failings of Nokia to their senior leadership. Their collapse was a damn shame.
Think about it, after Nokia’s competitors came, smartphone screens are still getting bigger, batteries are getting bigger, and the use of precious metals in smartphones is increasing. And the smartphone market is still expensive. The smartphones we have have already surpassed computers. Before, the 3310 had a battery life of 4-5 days. Now, a 5000mAh battery can barely hold energy for 1 day. We charge it every day.. The demand for energy is increasing and they show us that the world’s resources are rapidly running out. I think these losses can be prevented responsibly. Why? Many unnecessary processes are running in the background on smartphones and draining the battery, we are constantly receiving updates and therefore we are upgrading our smartphones. Here is the price increase… Remember the news about energy resources, please..