smartphone

110 Articles

Front and back of the prototype phone

Neither Android Nor IOS: DIY Smartphone Runs On ESP32!

March 4, 2026 by 24 Comments

You may or may not be reading this on a smartphone, but odds are that even if you aren’t, you own one. Well, possess one, anyway — it’s debatable if the locked-down, one-way relationships we have with our addiction slabs counts as ownership. [LuckyBor], aka [Breezy], on the other hand — fully owns his 4G smartphone, because he made it himself.

OK, sure, it’s only rocking a 4G modem, not 5G. But with an ESP32-S3 for a brain, that’s probably going to provide plenty of bandwidth. It does what you expect from a phone: thanks to its A7682E simcom modem, it can call and text. The OV2640 Arducam module allows it to take pictures, and yes, it surfs the web. It even has features certain flagship phones lack, like a 3.5 mm audio jack, and with its 3.5″ touchscreen, the ability to fit in your pocket. Well, once it gets a case, anyway.

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Kodak MC3: Everything But A Phone In 2001

February 8, 2026 by 15 Comments

One of the constants in consumer electronics is that designers will try to put as many features into a single device as possible, whether it’s a Walkman with a radio tuner or a new class of devices that crams a photo and video camera in the same enclosure as a music player. At the time that the Kodak MC3 was released this made it a rather unique device, with it in hindsight being basically a smartphone without the phone, as [Tech Tangents] aptly notes in his recent video on the device.

Six years before Apple’s iPhone would be announced, and eight years before the first iPod with a video camera, the Kodak MC3 was in many respects bleeding edge technology targeted straight at tech enthusiasts. For less than $300 you got VGA-quality images, CompactFlash storage, and MP3 playback capability. The videos it produced were 320×240 resolution, h.263 encoded MOVs with a maximum length of 4 seconds at 20 FPS, or 4 minutes with a 64 MB CF card.

The unit that [Tech Tangents] got used came with a 128 MB CF card, but couldn’t use a 2 GB CF card, which is a shame. The screen on it got a lot of flak for not not having a backlight, but this was common for the era, as were the poor viewing angles. Ditto for the poor video quality, as anyone who invested in consumer digital cameras in the early 2000s can attest to. In that respect this Kodak device was probably a bit too ambitious with its features for the era, maybe to compensate for it completely missing the boat on the rise of digital camera technology around the time.

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Symbian On Nokia Lives Again, In 2026

February 4, 2026 by 52 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 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 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 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! 

phyphox

Smartphone Sensors Unlocked: Turn Your Phone Into A Physics Lab

September 7, 2025 by 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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