Pro tip: don't buy the new versions "Nokia 3210 2024" and similar models. I did, two times, with slightly different models, and they are of exceptionally poor quality: dead after one year, very buggy firmware. The customer support is an AI with no real answer. They recommended to install an app "from the Google Play app store" which is nonsense for a dumbphone.

They are very cheap noname phones, branded with the name Nokia, but I am sure no Nokia R&D team was involved in these products.

I was hoping to find a part 2, but since part 1 was written over 2 years ago I guess there's not much chance of that...

> While the Memes generally refer to the 3210 or the 3310, the classic 5110 is no less a condender for most robust general use mobile phone available.

The reason for that (I think) is not that the 5110 is less robust, but that the 3210 and 3310 were much more widespread - they came onto the market when mobile phones really started to become widespread, while the 5110 (their predecessor), with its stub antenna and bulkier size, looks a bit like the last representative of the previous era...

I'm not too well-versed in hardware - is it really that easy to swap out a 2G modem with a 4G modem and have it "just work" without touching the drivers? Even if the baseband/modem chips miraculously do conform perfectly to some I/O protocol at the hardware level despite being multiple generations apart, wouldn't the difference in timings break whatever firmware the Nokia 5110 has, which was expecting only a single very specific hardware configuration? Or is the author planning to also hack the drivers?

Given the lack of a Part 2, I'm guessing some of the optimism in the article about how easy it would be was misplaced. I know very little about this stuff but presumably he would need to write some code for the SIM7600SA that would allow it to interface seamlessly with the UI board, which sounds far from trivial (unless maybe the UI board is very well documented)?

What I learned with this article is the English idiom:

"Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched."

Which in my language translates to:

"You should not sell the bear’s skin before killing it."

Not that it appears in the article, but rather because the author wrote the blog post before doing the thing. Which results in a blog post essentially saying "here is the cool thing I plan to do", which was apparently never done.

Anyway, I'm happy to know about counting chickens now :-).

HMD (Human Mobile Devices)[0] has exclusive rights to produce phones under the Nokia brand.

Now, HMD has decided to drop the Nokia name from the new phones because it's not helping them. Nokia has lost its glory, and HMD took the right step to use its name.

People who have old Nokia phones should keep them as it is like a lost meaningful art.

[0] https://www.hmd.com

Sound incredible !

I like the word "simply" in this sentence

> i will simply be able to recreate the baseboard with the new 4G module, a microcontroller, and some audio processing and power management circuitry and it will be able to seamlessly fit inside the phone.

Seems like a bigger project than the author would let us think ! But I hope to see the PCB soon !

Are there any not outrageously expensive, tough, battery-goes-for-weeks, does calls and SMS and wifi hotspot and maybe even F-Droid but a small screen, and maybe has at least LTE so that it is safe to be used for years, type devices?

I've looked once or twice, and found two categories: one was expensive phones leaning in to the "super slick minimalist" thing, which looked like they could be good devices and cover what I'm looking for, but again, 300 dollars or more type range.

The other was remakes of the "old classics", which were cheap, and claimed to cover roughly what I was hoping for, but are actually horrible quality, as another commenter said.

Maybe there's no solution, and those expensive ones are the only good option. Exceptions, or surprises, please throw them at me!

Looking for someone who can breathe new life into old phones, like Singer does with some Porsche models.

> The Nokia 5110 is a 2G telephone, meaning it uses the original 2G mobile network to communicate. This network has long been decommissioned in most western countries, including Australia.

In Europe, 3G is shutting down, but 2G as a fallback seems to be staying for years to come.

> However, 2G networks were still available as of 2023 in most parts of the world, while notably excluding the majority of carriers in North America, East Asia, and Australasia.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G

AFAIK, in the US, T-Mobile still has a 2G network.

My old Nokia 6310i from 2003 was in use until a year or two ago with my mother in law. And with the original battery lasting for days! Then finally on/off button broke. While nowadays phones not only have a glass in the front, which is understandable, but in the back too. So fragile. What would grandpa Nokia say to his ancestors?

The Quectel BG95 is a similar modem chip. If you want to add low-bandwidth connectivity in a project you can just get a BG95 or this Simcom as a devkit and e.g. a 1NCE SIM card, hook up the UART pins to your microcontroller and you're off to go. (You may need a logic level converter in between)

It's a shame that even if OP did complete this project the phone would likely not work in Australia where their based post 3G shutdown! The government mandates that telcos block all phones that cannot make VoLTE emergency calls, and instead of figuring out how to do this, the telcos maintain a whitelist of phones. This has led to a large amount of even modern 4G & 5G phones getting bricked[^1].

[^1]: https://medium.com/@jamesdwho/australias-3g-shutdown-why-you...

Some say this brave adventurer met his end when the 5110 fought back against the insult to its sacred internals.

Others say bestowing the power of 4G on a device as formidable as the 5110 opened a portal to realms hitherto unknown, to which our hero travelled, and we'll meet him again someday.

But my guess? He's still out there, trying to make the dream of a 4G-enabled 5110 a reality. And I still have hope for a "Part 2".

Nokia 5110 but with Android and full QUERTY keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7VOflsuVS4

5110 was fantastic. I did not realize this before, but about 10 years ago needed a replacement phone quickly and had an old 5110 in storage. Charged up, powered up, switched on and in less than 10 seconds could make a call. Fantastic booting speed, very fast phone.

Found a video where the boot-up speed/usage are shown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d40KwKvCGZo

It's such an odd problem from my perspective as someone who doesn't live in a western country! We still have 2G on all carriers and seemingly no plans to shut it down. So, if you want to use an old (GSM) phone, it's a non-issue, you just pop your modern SIM card into it and it just works :)

I was excited to learn the new word "eniminable", but I think you meant "inimitable", OP.

I would pay for a Nokia 5110 that is exactly like then except for the 4g call/sms part

I know the 5110 is one of the unbreakable OG’s but I’d much rather see 6210/6310 brought back to life. That phone looks cool even for 2024 and the ergonomic design is still usable. 5110 was so bulky!

I think that you would still end up with the inferior battery life of 4G. That was the killer feature of those phones. Our technology seems to have degraded in that regard over the years.

Just a wishful plan, nothing happened as it seems (post is 2 years old)

I recenly bought a Nokia 6300, not as a main mobile phone but because it includes Tethering, it is very light, changeable battery, practical as a mobile hotspot. It also has WhatsApp though.

Should be marked as [2022].

Indeed, the announced Part 2 has not been linked so far...

These phones didn't have the modern smartphone architecture where there are separate CPU cores for the user OS and the modem. It's one single CPU core that does both the UI and all the low-level stuff required for communication with the tower. They were going to replace the board that contains that CPU and all the radio circuitry with one they were going to design from scratch around that 4G module.

No, it's like reusing keyboard and monitor for a new PC. This phone uses those parts fully separated from the computer part that the author argues it should be possible to remake just the host computer part to recreate the experience.

4G doesn't even have a proper voice call support, and substitutes that with a carrier grade Discord type thing called VoLTE(oversimplification). Zero chance old firmware could work.

No. This phones keypad , controller, and screen are on a separate board.

This would be like plugging your monitor and keyboard into a new computer.

There are some lorawan handheld communicatiors using surplus blackberry cases and keyboards from blackberries that never were, that they got for pennies.

Except this dude wants to drop in a roll-your-own cellphone board with a basic os, instead of a lorawan radio and basic os. Same idea. But he will have to design this.

Whereas You can get schematics to build a lorawan communicator with blackberry parts, and there are community supported roms for that

I think the idea here is to basically create a new phone, but use the original case, buttons and display.

As a sibling says, this likely won't work for a Nokia feature phone, because it's an integrated design and there's no separate modem.

For a design with a modem module and a ux module, it might possibly just work to swap things out, but it would depend on how VoLTE is supported. If that is all managed by the modem module, then you're probably good.

These modem modules are generally a serial port that speaks Hayes (AT) protocol. Plus some analog lines for mic and speaker. Some 4g modules might be serial over USB and may leave VoLTE entirely up to the application module, that's going go look different.

Some of the modules are a qualcom SoC that runs headless Android. Which works, I guess, but seems bizarre.

No, of course not. That's why this article is two years old without an update.

It won't go for weeks, but days, and it takes some sideloading and finagling to get certain apk's to work, but I use a Sonim XP3+.

Runs Android Go, big battery that lasts a while, I can use Signal Messenger on it (though not super well), and it's tank-like in its construction. If you want to take that up a notch in terms of build quality, Kyocera sells a similar phone, the Dura XV Extreme+, which is roughly $250.

r/dumbphones is a decent resource. Unsuprisingly, it's not a large community, but it's a good place to get people's anecdotes about specific models.

Yeah, look at the Sonim XP3+/XP5+ (depending if you want a flip phone or candybar).

Rugged, Android-Go powered "Call/SMS/MMS" devices, week and a half on battery if you leave it on constantly, hotspot, and you can, if you insist, sideload apps. Just, don't expect any modern Android app to be usable on a 240x320 screen with keyboard input only. If you use a Bluetooth mouse, it's marginally less-awful, but still, don't expect much to work.

I did get KDE Connect working - that allows you to send text messages with a real computer keyboard. It's not as nicely integrated as the Apple iMessage ecosystem, but it does allow for sending texts without having to T9 the whole thing. Alternately, the better option is to just move longer conversations to email or an actual phone call.

One of these shouldn't run you much over about $150 (in the US), and they work fine on the super cheap MVNO operators out there.

My writeup from about a year ago: https://www.sevarg.net/2023/12/30/more-flip-phone-sonim-xp3-...

It is being deprecated now. Comparison map:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dumbphones/comments/1eppo3p/tmobile...

https://imgur.com/a/Zg6XYch

https://www.t-mobile.com/support/coverage/t-mobile-network-e...

>Capacity and coverage of T-Mobile's 2G (GSM) network is expected to change starting as early as September 1, 2024.

> AFAIK, in the US, T-Mobile still has a 2G network.

They do but most won't be able to use a phone this old on it. Reason being the SIM application was taken out of the issued sim cards years ago for T-Mobile (something like 6 years or so at this point). Newer 3G-era cellphones use the USIM application and can fall back to the 2G network.

So the only way to still use a device that's pre-3G (circa-2007 or so) on the 2G network is to have a SIM that's been activated the whole time. T-Mobile will not activate expired SIM cards that still contain the application.

Source: I have used back to the Sony Ericsson t68i this past summer on T-Mobile. If you have an ancient SIM and want to browse WAP 1.x as well you can use this site for the gateway: https://nbpfan.bs0dd.net/index.php?lang=eng&page=wap%2Fmain

EDIT: Funny thing about 3G-era phone support, you can use a euicc (removable ESIM) on a phone from 2007 (I used Sony Ericsson K850i) and it will work just fine with an activated esim to access 2G.

I am forever horrified when my 5G phone, which at my house already only gets 4G at best (the politics of cell towers in Southern England is just a sad sad story) drops now to 2G!!! Dropping a modern smartphone to 2G is like basically saying "no network". The only things I use it for are unusable. I rarely make calls. I rarely send SMS. Vodafone dropped 3G, O2 will drop it early next year and the others some time soonish too. Using a smart phone in a rural area now kind of feels like going back to 2007 if I am going to be honest.

2G is still strong in Germany as some industrial applications rely on it. It is not going to be deprecated any time soon. Maybe once they run out of spare parts.

Germany's mobile network is worse than most third world countries. Working on a train? No internet for you! Going a few meters outside a settlement? Might not even be able to do calls.

Correct. I still use my Nokia 6030 2G phone with T-Mobile in Minnesota/Wisconsin. And it's battery still lasts a week and I can't even feel it in my pocket it's so small. Impossible to destroy too; I've used roughly it since ~2008.