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.
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
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.
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. 😢
MEEGO!!!!
“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.