Cars and smartphones have something curious in common, just as most everyday saloon cars from different manufacturers have tended towards similarity, so have smartphones. Whether your smartphone the latest and greatest or only cost you $50 from a supermarket, it matters little to look at because both phones will be superficially near-identical black slabs.
It wasn’t always this way though, in decades past phones from different manufacturers each had their own flavours, and there was a variety in form factors to suit all tastes. There’s a ray of hope for fans of those days though, in the form of [befinitiv]’s 2000-era Sony flip phone. It runs Android. Yes, you read that right, there on the tiny screen is Android 9.
Of course whatever processor and electronics the phone came with are long gone, and instead the phone sports the internals of a modern Chinese watch-smartphone grafted in in place of the original. The whole electronics package fits in the screen opening, and though it required some wiring for the USB-C socket and a few other parts it looks for all the world from the outside as though it was meant to run Android. You can take a look in the video below the break.
He cheerfully admits that there’s still a way to go for example in getting the original keyboard working, but even with a tiny touchscreen it’s good enough to be a daily driver. It may be a little on the small side, but for those of us who miss our old phones maybe there’s hope in it for something new.
Meanwhile this isn’t the first re-use of an old phone we’ve seen recently.
Oh. For a moment i thought i could revamp my trusty Nokia N8 with that marvelous camera. :(
But a nice hack indeed!
Actually re using the camera would be possible, I suppose
Of course, you could accept it for what it is – a nice modification idea that might inspire someone to take their next steps “hacking” something. Maybe they would then write an article you would be happy with?
The kid with the clock still has the hacker spirit and is still doing more engineering than the kids who spend all day doing pointless things like playing outside or socializing (/s?). I like to see projects that make people think “oh that’s cool, maybe I could do that!” every once in a while.
Well…. It requires replacing all the electronics inside including the screen, leaving only the grey metallic casing behind. Might as well, put a Raspberry Pi 3 in a dot matrix printer and claim to convert it into a WiFi printer.
Cosign.
It could suffice a Pi 0 W, and a centronics-to-gpio HAT http://shop.elesar.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=76. Next configure wi-fi, CUPS and the appropriate ESC/P diriver and you’re on the go. You could use the existing parallel port ant then hide the pi somewhere.
You probably could hide the RPi 0 W inside a parallel port connection.
“Ghost in the cable” !
Flip phones are cooler than one-piece glass-fronted smart phones that get scratched and broken. Reminds me of how cool it was to see flip phones in the original Star Trek.
TBH, those Star Trek communicators always reminded me to the Braun shaver that my father had.
(This one: http://www.sammlung-design.de/braun-design/produkte/rasierer/index.php?rex_media_type=content&rex_media_file=sixtant_s_automatic_bn_2.jpg)
Uh, in that video I see a scratched Sony flip-phone with cracks in the glass. I guess for the authentic smartphone feeling? :D
My wife and I got those plastic snap on protectors for our phones. After years of horrific abuse, the protectors are scuffed and scratched, but the phone inside still looks like new.
I always liked the old Sony phones, I still have them around.
Also the W5 watch looks nice but I’d like to see the proper user manual before I buy.
Different vendors say that it takes a 32GB SD card, or don’t mention that, so I wonder if there are different models out there?
Also the camera is on the wrong side for a lefty who would wear such a thing on the r.h.s. limb, so I wonder if the screen auto-rotates so I can wear it upside-down?
It’s been so long since I wore a watch though…….
They shouldn’t? I don’t know, should they?
Obviously getting something as new as Android 9 on such a device requires an extreme hack swapping out all the guts as seen here.
But Android existed before most of us had ever heard of it. Google bought Android, they didn’t start it from scratch. It predated the iPhone.
So I guess some sort of Android device existed back in the days when Symbian was the smartest smartphone OS and WinCe was also a thing. Those devices didn’t look much different than the one in the picture so maybe something similar running some early version of Android existed? Obviously one couldn’t just slap on the Play Store and install all the latest apps everyone runs today but that would still technically be Android.
Considering how many security updates there have been since then, such a phone would probably get hacked very quickly.
He doesn’t even got the keyboard pad inside to hook up to the motherboard. Just the buttons. But still look neat though.
I’m not sure this could be called a flip phone. It’s a candybar phone with a keyboard cover, the microphone is at the base of the main body originally.
Non working keys ? :(
He basically used the shell of the phone as a case for the android watch. Nothing fancy. But I think it should be relatively easy to get that keypad working with a teensy, since these watches have USB.
Well, at that price you can buy a brand new printer, already with WiFi and perhaps also Ethernet.
Can the same modification for old unwannted windows mobile devices. For PDA only as well as phones?
I’m still waiting for someone to cram an Android phone into an original iPhone and utilize the screen, and buttons. They fit your pocket nicely, were sized for easy one handed operation and you could use a screw driver to replace the battery when it died. The old charge port would have to go though. Maybe hack a modern usb phone port to fit. Probably want one of the later versions that had the camera light but still maintained the small phone size.