Phones can be distracting objects if you’re not an enlightened master of the mental arts. Even just reading an email or glancing at your calendar can get you caught up checking other apps and notifications and waste your time. [Paul Lagier] built a device to eliminate this problem by showing him critical information right on […]
Back when phones used to ship with chargers in the box, you’d get a plugpack that could charge one device. Aftermarket manufacturers eventually started making chargers with four or five ports which were great for travelling. But what if you wanted to charge even more devices? You might build something like this rig from [DENKI […]
Australia’s payphones are an iconic part of the national landscape, even if they’re not as important as they once used to be. However, they’re having a resurgence of late, in part thanks to a new national pastime—the sport of Payphone Tag! Created by [Alex Allchin], the game is simple. To play, you first sign up […]
Remember those brick cellphones in the 1990s? They were comically large by today’s standards. These phones used the 1G network to communicate and, as such, have been unusable for decades now. However [Alan Boris] has resurrected this classic phone to operate today. Originally costing as much as today’s top-of-the-line phones, but instead of weighing just […]
There was an ideal of convergence, a long time ago, when one device would be all you need, digitally speaking. [ETA Prime] on YouTube seems to think we’ve reached that point, and his recent video about the Samsung S26 Ultra makes a good case for it. Part of that is software: Samsung’s DeX is a […]
Old desk phones are fairly useless these days unless you’re building a corporate PBX in your house. However, they can be fun to hack on, as [0x19] demonstrates by porting Doom to a Snom 360 office phone. The Snom 360 is a device from the early VoIP era, with [ox19] laying their hands on some examples […]
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 […]