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modding posts

Man turns luggable 25-year-old cellphone into OLED-packing HTPC


Do you remember the Mobira Talkman? No? That's okay, you may not have been born yet. In 1984 this was what all the sierra hotel financial traders had glued to their faces -- and clutched to their hips, since the thing was as big as a briefcase. 25 years later skilled modder Jani 'Japala' Pönkkö came across a free (and fully-functional) example and set upon completing his dream of turning it into an HTPC, which he has called the Dataman. Inside he managed to pack an Intel T5500 Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of DDR2 memory, a 32GB SSD, and a wireless network card. The 40-hour mod is laboriously detailed in photos at the read link, while the fruits of all that labor are shown in videos after the break, the first showing the pre-mod phone still working perfectly -- but complaining about the lack of network (like the Russian Empire's rule of Finland, the NMT network is long gone) -- and the second showing that green LCD replaced by a rather more colorful OLED one.

[Via The UberReview]

Handset modding massively popular in UK

Some of us here at Engadget Mobile have been known to load the occasional Super Mario Bros. ringtone on our handsets; maybe even a Birdo background graphic or three, we're not gonna lie. But that's as far as our modding efforts have ever gone, if you can really call that modding at all. It turns out that for some 86.4 percent of young folk between the ages of 16 and 18 in the UK, phone modding is practically a way of life -- and quite often, it's a rather comprehensive affair, according to a study commissioned by British carrier Orange. We're not talking about ringtones or backgrounds anymore, folks; we're talking about bold moves like applying sparking glue directly over your display, as you see here. Orange estimates that modding is an industry worth over $55 million in the UK alone, and expects it to double in the next year (how much sparkly glue are these kiddies buying, anyway?). If we're going to spend this much time and energy in drastically altering the appearance of our phone, we're personally going to go the NES controller route, but more power to those teens who've decided they no longer need to see their phone's LCD.

[Via textually.org]




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