May 2005? Nothing special. We sold a lot of control systems with our Qt-based GUI /sw.

Back in May 2005 I was still at school, and having bought an iPod mini recently, I was working on a Java-based podcast downloader using Gtk+ to fill it with content from Linux (archived news). I quickly realized then that Java wasn't very common on Linux Desktops (it was not GPL'd yet, and the license made it hard for distros to ship it) and hard to install with the Java-Gnome bindings, and so I began to learn Python (that project is still around today). At that time, I recently switched to the then-new Ubuntu (was using Slackware before), and was reading Planet GNOME in Blam. In fact, I still remember reading lots of postings there about the 770 (a quick search turned up this and this - my search also found something related: Nokia adopting KHTML for S60 in June of the same year). (It wasn't until early 2008 that I bought a N800 and got into Maemo app development, mostly because I was curious how well my application worked on Maemo - Mika ported gPodder in early 2007, probably after Tuomas suggested porting it to the 770 in 2006. It was even used as an example on how to port Gtk+ Desktop apps to Hildon.)

This is also interesting: maemo.org as of 2005-05-26 (Web Archive) - with the old logo and the FAQs stating how the name "Maemo" was created using pwgen

Happy Birthday, Maemo! Has been great fun so far

That's the year I bought my first symbian phone. The 6630. It completely changed my view of what a mobile phone could be. Up until then I'd had only dumb phones, so being able to run picodrive on the 6630 blew my mind at the time. Next phone to have that effect on me was the N900 in 2010. This amazing site and community had a lot to do with that, of course. Happy birthday Maemo.org!

Back in that time I had my Siemens SX1 (running S60v1) already for a year, went into the foray of mobile offline navigation with Route66. I was also very short to quitting my then-current job (which i did a month later) that at this time involved building & testing (& partly designing) J2ME midlet / J2EE backend solution for public traffic mobile ticketing on different cellphone devices.

Long Live TMO

On 2005 I was at my second year of Computer science and I met this chinesse guy with a 9500 communicator which at the time I had no idea what it was. Thus started my interested into mobile (nokia) handsets

2005? It was probably a time, when Dinosaurs walked on Earth, and I was learning how to make my spear sharper. Or something like that.

Seriously though, for sure I've had no idea about linux handhelds, and so many live-shaping changes happened in my personal life since then, that it's hard/impossible to list them. Seriously, I haven't realized, that it have been so much time since Maemo start.

Happy birthday, and long live!

/Estel

Happy Birthday, maemo.org!

And want to say a big 'Thank You' to all the helpful and friendly people I've met through the forums!

That 9500 Communicator had a UI called Hildon that was the starting point of the Hildon Application Framework users have touched between the 770 and the N900.

qgil, you should write a book on this history. I bet thousands of people would be interested to read about the N900's and N9's legacy. Fascinating stuff

The Register has a nice writeup here.