Symbian On Nokia Lives Again, In 2026

February 4, 2026 by Jenny List 34 Comments

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.

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Limiting Battery Risk On Repurposed Smartphones With PostmarketOS

February 1, 2026 by Lewin Day 28 Comments

PostmarketOS is a Linux distribution specifically designed for those who wish to repurpose old smartphones as general-use computers, to a degree. This can be a great way to reuse old hardware. However, for [Bry50], it was somewhat discomforting leaving the phone’s aging lithium battery perpetually on charge. A bit of code was thus whipped up to provide a greater measure of safety.

The concept is simple enough—lithium batteries are at lower risk of surprise combustion events if they’re held at a lower state of charge. To this end, [Bry50] modified the device tree in PostmarketOS to change the maximum charge level. Apparently, maximum charge was set at a lofty 4.4V (100%), but this was reconfigured to a lower level of 3.8V, corresponding to a roughly 40-50% state of charge. The idea is that this is a much healthier way to maintain a battery hooked up to power for long periods of time. There’s one small hitch—the system will get confused if the battery voltage is higher than the 3.8 V setpoint when switching over. It’s thus important to let the device discharge to a lower level if you choose to make this change.

It’s a neat mod that both increases safety, but keeps the battery on hand to let the system ride through minor power outages. If you’re new to the world of repurposing old smartphones, fear not. [Bryan] also has a tutorial on getting started with PostmarketOS for the unfamiliar. If you’re working on your own projects in this space, we’d love to hear about them—so get on over to the tipsline!

How Water Vapor Makes Smartphones Faster

September 25, 2025 by Lewin Day 25 Comments

Once upon a time, home computers were low-powered enough that they barely needed any cooling at all. An Amiga 500 didn’t even have a heatsink on the CPU, while the early Macintosh got by with a single teeny little fan.

Modern smartphones are far more powerful than these ancient machines, packed with multi-core processors running at speeds of many gigahertz. Even still, they’ve generally been able to get by without any active cooling devices. However, as manufacturers continue to push the envelope of performance, they’ve had to scramble for ways to suck heat out of these handheld computers. Vapor chamber cooling has risen as a solution to this problem, using simple physics to keep your handset humming along at maximum speed for longer.

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A Look At Not An Android Emulator

September 10, 2025 by Fenix Guthrie 14 Comments

Recently, Linux has been rising in desktop popularity in no small part to the work on WINE and Proton. But for some, the year of the Linux desktop is not enough, and the goal is now for the year of the Linux phone. To that end, an Android Linux translation layer called Android Translation Layer (we never said developers were good at naming) has emerged for those running Linux on their phones.

Android Translation Layer (ATL) is still in very early days, and likely as not, remains unpackaged on your distro of choice. Fortunately, a workaround is running an Alpine Linux container with graphics pass through via a tool like Distrobox or Toolbox. Because of the Alpine derived mobile distribution postmarketOS, ATL is packaged in the Alpine repos.

In many ways, running Android apps on Linux is much easier then Windows apps. Because Android apps are architecture independent, hardware emulation is unnecessary. With such similar kernels, on paper at least, Android software should run with minimal effort on Linux. Most of what ATL provides is a Linux/Android hardware abstraction layer glue to ensure Android system calls make their way to the Linux kernel.

Of course, there is a lot more to running Android apps, and the team is working to implement the countless Android system APIs in ATL. For now, older Android apps such as Angry Birds have the best support. Much like WINE, ATL will likely devolve into a game of wack-a-mole where developers implement fresh translation code as new APIs emerge and app updates break. Still, WINE is a wildly successful project, and we hope to see ATL grow likewise!

If you want to get your Android phone to talk to Linux, make sure to check out this hack next!

Smartphone Sensors Unlocked: Turn Your Phone Into A Physics Lab

September 7, 2025 by Matt Varian 18 Comments

These days, most of us have a smartphone. They are so commonplace that we rarely stop to consider how amazing they truly are. The open-source project Phyphox has provided easy access to your phone’s sensors for over a decade. We featured it years ago, and the Phyphox team continues to update this versatile application.

Phyphox is designed to use your phone as a sensor for physics experiments, offering a list of prebuilt experiments created by others that you can try yourself. But that’s not all—this app provides access to the many sensors built into your phone. Unlike many applications that access these sensors, Phyphox is open-source, with all its code available on its GitHub page.

The available sensors depend on your smartphone, but you can typically access readings from accelerometers, GPS, gyroscopes, magnetometers, barometers, microphones, cameras, and more. The app includes clever prebuilt experiments, like measuring an elevator’s speed using your phone’s barometer or determining a color’s HSV value with the camera. Beyond phone sensors, the Phyphox team has added support for Arduino BLE devices, enabling you to collect and graph telemetry from your Arduino projects in a centralized hub.

Thanks [Alfius] for sharing this versatile application that unlocks a myriad of uses for your phone’s sensors. You can use a phone for so many things. Really.

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Knowing That It Is Possible

September 6, 2025 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

We like to think that we can do almost anything. Give me a broken piece of consumer electronics, and I’ll open it up and kick the capacitors. Give me an embedded Linux machine, and I’ll poke around for a serial port and see if it’s running uboot. But my confidence suddenly pales when you hand me a smartphone.

Now that’s not to say that I’ve never replaced a broken screen or a camera module with OEM parts. The modern smartphone is actually a miracle of modularity, with most sub-assemblies being swappable, at least in principle, and depending on your taste for applying heat to loosen up whatever glue holds the damn things together.

But actually doing hardware hacking on smartphones is still outside of my comfort zone, and that’s a shame. So I was pretty pleased to see [Marcin Plaza] attempt gutting a smartphone, repackaging it into a new form factor, and even adding a new keyboard to it. The best moment in that video for me comes around eight minutes in, when he has completely disassembled all of the modules and is laying them out on his desk to see how little he needs to make the thing work. And the answer is batteries, motherboard, USB-C, power button, and a screen. That starts to seem like a computer build, and that’s familiar turf.

That reminded me of [Scotty Allen]’s forays into cell-phone hackery that culminated in his building one completely from parts, and telling us all about it at Supercon ages ago. He told me that the turning point for him was realizing that if you have access to the tools to put it together and can get some of the impossibly small parts manufactured and/or assembled for you, that it’s just like putting a computer together.

So now I’ve seen two examples. [Scotty] put his together from parts, and [Marcin] actually got a new daughterboard made that interfaces with the USB to add a keyboard. Hardware hacking on a cellphone doesn’t sound entirely impossible. You’d probably want a cheap old used one, but the barrier to entry there isn’t that bad. You’ll probably have to buy some obscure connectors – they are tiny inside smartphones – and get some breakout boards made. But maybe it’s possible?

Anyone have more encouragement?

Self-Hosting A Cluster On Old Phones

April 9, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 35 Comments

The phones most of us carry around in our pockets every day hold a surprising amount of computing power. It’s somewhat taken for granted now that we can get broadband in our hands in most places; so much so that when one of these devices has reached the end of its life it’s often just tossed in a junk drawer even though its capabilities would have been miraculous only 20 years ago. But those old phones can still be put to good use though, and [Denys] puts a few of them back to work running a computing cluster.

Perhaps the most significant flaw of smartphones, though, is that most of them are locked down so much by their manufacturers that it’s impossible to load new operating systems on them. For this project you’ll need to be lucky enough (or informed enough) to have a phone with an unlockable bootloader so that a smartphone-oriented Linux distribution called postmarketOS can be installed. With this nearly full-fledged Linux distribution to work from, the phones can be accessed by ssh and then used to run Kubernetes for the computing cluster. [Denys] has three phones in his cluster that run a few self-hosted services for him.

[Denys] also points out in his guide that having a phone that can run postmarketOS might save some money when compared to buying a Raspberry Pi to run the same service, and the phones themselves can often be more powerful as well. This is actually something that a few others have noted in the past as well. He’s gone into a considerable amount of detail on how to set this up, so if you have a few old smartphones gathering dust, or even those with broken screens or other physical problems where the underlying computing resources are still usable, it’s a great way to put these machines back to work.

Thanks to [mastro Gippo] for the tip!