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this phone is really, really cool. but i do have some critiques; for starters, it doesn't really work as a phone. because it can't connect to 4 or 5G networks. what's funny is that one of the messages i can access is literally a warning from AT&T about the 2G network shutdown. another thing about this phone is that despite the nice feel of the buttons (real buttons! no artificial haptics needed!), and the aesthetically pleasing UI, it's not very intuitive for me to use, and because it's pretty old by now, i haven't been able to find even a PDF of a user manual anywhere. all the useable search results, if they exist, are probably buried by results about the newer Nokias & other phones. not to mention, a lot of the services the phone is meant to connect to -- like Yahoo messaging services -- are no longer running (at least, not in the same configurations) so the connections would lead nowhere even if it could use the internet. my critiques, though, instead of putting my love of this phone to a stop, give me a few ideas.
i know that phones are comprised of two major parts (stay with me here, i'm going somewhere with this): the guts, and the body. the guts are the SIM cards, the wires, the chips. the body is what holds the guts, plus accessories (camera, the cute little antennae Nokias have that i don't know actually serves a technical purpose, etc). as far as i know, there is no reason besides the regular financial bullshit that you can't put Android guts, or old Apple guts, for instance, in a Nokia body. if you have the skill, i mean. and somebody out there does. we live in a time with not only technology and all the evils that come with it, but people, too, that are willing to fuck with it and all the good that comes with that. if i could find someone with the skills to do this, with a similar vision to mine -- let people be hyper-specific with the guts they want, especially if they provide as much of the guts as they already have, by using the insides of older phones, thereby providing less 'incentive' for exploitation of places - well, and importantly, people, like in the Congo -- then i would be willing to handle both customer services and design. and design refers here to both the aesthetics of what's on the screen, as well as the colors on the body of the phone. i mean, making custom phones wouldn't be easy, but it might be worthwhile, if it meant the difference between holding onto parts as long as they work vs buying the whole new model as soon as it comes out for no reason but pure convenience. maybe, maybe not. this is just a vision, that doesn't have to come true. i don't have the money to pay an engineer and i don't code, so even if i nailed the aesthetics and isolated some parts i wanted, this has a chance to never work. it doesn't have to. there are things far more important in this world.
but i'm sharing the idea just in case someone else out there is looking for it. why not?
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Kie
Alriiight plenny to say about this ^_^ just throwing my two cents as a computer engineering student
First off, when discussing computing machines we typically divide them into two parts: software (basically everything "digital") and hardware (the actual electronic components the mahcine runs on).
You brought up both apple and android phones, and although I think at least part of this is feasible with Android, it really doesn't seem to be with iOS/Apple. There is a fundamental difference between Android and Apple phones: Apple phones run on a proprietary OS (iOS), that is owned by Apple, and exclusive to their devices. On the other hand, anyone can build an Android phone, as Android is an open-source OS just like Linux. All this to say, that getting iOS working on a custom machine is a whole can of worms that I would not know how to tackle.
So Android is the obvious choice here, and it's what many of the modern "old school" phones on the market run. Even if you go for an old version, it's really easy to find apps you can run on it. I have an Andoid 6.0 phone that I use as an ereader/emulator (I made a blog post about it some time ago!), and can tell you first-hand that compatibility is not an issue.
Now that we have software tackled, we can discuss the hardware. Cramming everything in an old shell might be a bit of a nightmare. Ideally you would be running an Android version along the lines of Android 5.0, something light weight so you don't need much from your hardware. But even cutting down on power, a lot of components from smartphones would definetly struggle to fit. I'm mostly concerned about the mother board. They tend to be quite large (and often oddly-shaped in order to fit the original phone), and it might be hard to find a suitable motherboard without having to resort to custom printing. Battery is another major concern of mine. I'm not sure the original battery would be enough to properly support android, but at the same time modern smartphone batteries would never fit. And finally we get to the last main issue, which is the lack of a touch screen. Most modern "old school" flip pohones that mount android still come with a touch screen, because many android apps lack proper keyboard support.
So although it might be possible, it would require significant investment in resources.
If you are interested in recycling components, it would be better to repurpose them for use in another smartphone ^_^
francis, fran
i'm going to university soon! i'll be sure to know the people from the computer science and electrical engineering majors to design a retro, nokia-esq phone with the ability to update and run on 4G / 5G.
however, i wouldn't expect such a phone to be able to run apps or even an internet browser because the software developers of such apps probably wouldn't want to spend energy working on smthn like "nokia compatible instagram" unless it was predicted to gain substantial traction over mainstream phones. of course, i also wouldn't expect that someone with a vintage-esq phone wants to be doomscrolling on it.
calling, texting, playing files, sending files, and maybe running some modified gameboy games (possibly in multiplayer with other such nokia users!) might be your only options with such a phone.
now if you're talking about totally just making an apple phone in the style of a nokia phone, i'd probably just say that the main limitation or inconvenience would be that you'd have to navigate with a tiny dpad cursor, which means you're basically just using a really shitty and slow iphone. there's a reason phones now use touchscreen instead of keypad, so even if you could fully operate iOS 18.5 on a nokia, it'd be painfully slow just to open instagram and type in your username and password, and even more painful to text people. imagine using your current keypad system to enter in the full title of an album on a streaming service - say, "i can't handle change by francis soundworks." that would probably take me like at least 2 minutes.
i think the bigger problem here isn't really in the hardware or technical issues of building such a phone but that the way people use phones has changed drastically since the flip phone days. mainly in that people do an obsessive amount of texting and content consuming now... information is being exchanged at an accelerating rate... building such a phone would have to be a passion project. which isn't impossible either. i would be down to do that honestly if i had the time and patience to learn software and run like a tiny linux flipphone capable of receiving 4G/5G