Apparently they've been rebuilding full "new" N95s and other Nokia fare from old motherboards and new spares/knockoff parts. It's like a new legitimate knockoff from the grey market? They've even got things like 'refurbed' N900s...
Mine came with a text message still in the inbox from testing it with a test SMS on China Mobile in 2025 - so even the modem works!
I'll have to give this a shot on my own N95.
https://leoncini.com.ar/proyecto.php?id=xash3d since it's not linked from TomsHardware.
OpenBTS/YateBTS/OsmoBTS and friends are useful here to spin up a working network and relive a happier time.
I've been meaning to get one of the tiny SDR cards like an XRTX and place it into a Pi or similar device and build a "mobile mobile hotspot" - LTE/5G in, 2G/3G out for old crap.
EDIT: I almost forgot, too. The N95 has Wi-Fi and a SIP client, so it's not completely useless even in 2026!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9CFrJnCKqU
At that time I had a flip phone maybe a black berry curve so not aware of it
As an original N900 user, I got one of the eBay "refurbed" N900s from China I think a few years ago for fun. It was a piece of junk, literally, like arrived with broken keyboard etc. A clear case of false advertising. I got a full refund.
YMMV. I was really thinking I was buying a proper refurbed N900. Maybe they're out there. Buyer beware.
Then, they added Steam, and my Celeron 300 had trouble running it. Shit by Valve to coule games with a mandatory subscriber agreement. Even breaks EU law to "one-sided change" it again and again later, to keep access to your game library.
(maybe even Pentium 100)
I would need to search the specs, but a N95 has 1 core and well below 1GB. A factor of dozens in the specs, but still you can get good user experience on the old devices if the software is written in a smart way.
The lower resolution of the N95 acts in favor of performance. But admittedly against user experience.
We used to do most of the same things (browse the web, send some email or texts, make phone calls, listen to music, watch videos) with hardware that was positively tiny by comparison.
Shame Valve still hasn't open-sourced the GoldSource engine yet, though I suppose Nexon and the Sven Coop lead dev have paid licenses that they still want to extract value from.
I still like to think of a parallel time line where Symbian actually had a good and usable app store, and developers had been supported.
Went with an iPhone 3GS.
Still think about that from time to time. I don't regret it, per-se, as the jailbreak scene at the time was very exciting.
It ran Maemo 5, and I still miss it even though I never owned one myself. Unfortunately Nokia fumbled everything.
Before my time but I remember an old colleague saying how hard it was to find decent documentation for Symbian development.
As for the HL1 port: I love it, always wanted an N95 (I had an N80ie that I loved), and these sorts of retro experiments are always a joy to read about.
Fweh.
No thank you, and I won't be coming back.
