The N900 is an interesting piece of hardware, perhaps a phone based on an Allwinner chipset with a fully separate baseband processor would be the way to go for an N900 replacement?
I guess the major impediments I see are getting an LTE baseband at a decent price point, and providing Signal Private Messenger and other apps that you can get on iOS & Android, as we have seen, developers won't go for a 3rd development target (Windows Phone).
I want a unix phone.
I want a dialer command that can be used with pipes and stdio.
I want to consume "signal strength" with AT+CSQ from a command that I can pipe into things.
I want to see nearby towers in a 'top' like interface that shows me what the local carrier environment looks like. I want to enable and disable airplane mode with a command.
It would seem like you could do this with android, but I don't think you can ...
My OpenMoko is still (free)running fine. It pre-dates the N900, and Nokia's previous "internet tablets" were WiFi-only, so weren't really 'phones.
When Android came out I installed it, but wasn't a fan. Been with Qtopia ever since.
I've since been given an N900, but it doesn't boot. Looking forward to the Neo900 (I'm scared to install a GTA04 board myself :P ).
Sadly... The compromise is AOSP or copperhead OS, CM equivalents. With daydream tightly controlled by Google/Play perhaps genuine FOSS lovers need to live in 2D world.
"At the end of the story Nokia entrusted the project “to the community”, which was equivalent to abandoning it. [...] I am happy with a bleeding edge, open source, but much more limited ZTE Open phone running the Firefox OS."
History repeating. I loved Firefox OS, now Windows Mobile and I think Microsoft is not far away from releasing it "to the community". I don't want to live in a world without choice.
Obviously this publisher hasn't heard of the Ubuntu Phone.
Three days ago, a Jolla C replaced an iPhone 5S as my main phone. To be fair, me using iOS was just a kind of an experiment. Before that, I was using a CM build without Google Apps using FDroid as unique app repository.
I must say that, while still needs some polishing, Sailfish OS (which is not 100% free, but is quite there, and provides a complete Linux experience), does the job. My Pebble works, my BT car kit works, and I have all apps I need. In fact, my biggest complain is about the hardware, being underpowered and with an atrocious camera. An official port from Jolla to some mid level device would make me _very_ happy.
In some countries, like mine, the FOSS mobile OS killer has a name: WhatsApp. Without official support for FFOS or Ubuntu Touch, and being very aggressive against third party apps (banning their users), most people can't even think of them as an option for daily usage.
Jolla goes around this bundling a commercial Android Dalvik emulator. Not the best solution, but one quite pragmatic.