Although it can be hard to imagine in today’s semiconductor-powered, digital world, there was electrical technology around before the widespread adoption of the transistor in the latter half of the 1900s that could do more than provide lighting. People figured out clever ways to send information around analog systems, whether that was a telegraph or […]
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 […]
An analog telephone adapter (ATA), or FXS gateway, is a device that allows traditional analog phones to be connected to a digital voice-over-IP (VoIP) network. In addition to this, you can even create a local phone exchange using just analog phones without connecting to a network as [Playful Technology] demonstrates in a recent video. The […]
Can a long-obsolete Linux phone from 2009 be of use in 2025? [Yaky] has a Nokia N900, and is giving it a go. Back in the 2000s, Nokia owned the mobile phone space. They had a smartphone OS even if they didn’t understand app distribution, they had the best cameras, screens, antennas, the lot. They threw […]
We suspect kids today — and some adults — are confused about phone terminology. In today’s world, “hanging up” and “dialing,” for example, are abstract words without the physical reference that older people remember. But some people have a soft spot for the old rotary dial phones, including [Stavros], who wired a rotary phone to […]
Some parts of the world still have ample 2G coverage; for those of in North America, 2G is long gone and 3G has either faded into dusk or beginning its sunset. The legendary [dosdude1] shows us it need not be so, however: Building a Custom 2G GSM Cellular Base Station is not out of reach, […]
It all started with a sarcastic comment right here on Hackaday.com: ” How many phones do you know that sport a 5 and 1/4 inch diskette drive?” — and [Paul Sanjay] took that personally, or at least thought “Challenge accepted” because he immediately hooked an old Commodore floppy drive to his somewhat-less-old smartphone. The argument […]
While our eyes are miraculous little devices, they aren’t very sensitive outside of the normal old red, green, and blue spectra. The camera in your phone is far more sensitive, and scientists want to use those sensors in place of expensive hyperspectral ones. Researchers at Purdue have a cunning plan: use a calibration card. The […]
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 […]
Miniaturization is a trend that comes and goes in the cellular phone space. For a while, our phones were all getting smaller, then they started getting bigger again as screens expanded to show us ever more content and advertising. The iPhone air is going back the other way, with a design that aims to sell […]