Hacking the T-Mobile Sidekick, 20 Years Too Late

39 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by microcode
(x86.cx)

7 Comments

sikozu

5 hours ago

Such a great read. I've always loved the design of the Sidekick.

Would it ever be possible to load a version of Android onto one of these phones with enough effort? I suspect the hardware would make it difficult.

duskwuff

3 hours ago

> Would it ever be possible to load a version of Android onto one of these phones with enough effort?

Almost certainly not, and if you did it'd be practically unusable. The highest-end Sidekick devices had 128 MB of RAM; the first Android phones, like the HTC Dream, had 192 MB or more. It'd also have no network connectivity, as the Sidekick was a 2G / 3G device and didn't support 802.11 wireless.

toast0

an hour ago

There was an Android build for OpenMoko Neo 1973 and it only had 128 MB ram (it also was missing some cpu extension and had to use kernel emulation for that, which wasn't a good experience... but nothing about that phone was a good experience, which is why I don't preorder hardware anymore)

microcode

5 hours ago

Thanks! Probably not. It’s way too limited, especially on RAM, and flashing a new OS needs one of the 1024-bit carrier keys, not the developer key I cracked.

SnehanshnC

9 hours ago

tuff af ur brain works different

justsomehnguy

5 hours ago

I found my old Moto E4 (5th gen as some site says) not long ago.

Decided to wipe it so I can give it out and... things went south really hard because built-in wipe in LineageOS borks the OS loader and no amount of flashing works. In the end I even borked the boot loader and things started to look really awry. I found a way to flash it, thanks to the guys[0] who found a sploit for MTK loader - and confirming what E4 was one of the most 'unkillable' phones of it's time.

But the hardest part wasn't that but:

actually finding a working copy of the official firmware

Google Apps really-really-really wants to update it all to the most current versions... and then it's just starts to fail every 5 seconds with an annoying modal notification.

Thankfully, F-Droid was already installed so I just disabled everything Google and made a... not-so-dumb phone. But, despite it working good enough - it's totally useless for anything other than calling and e-mailing with a 3rd party client (would K9 even install on it? I don't know).

[0] https://github.com/MTK-bypass/bypass_utility

JudahNyquist

10 hours ago

Very cool! How did you think of this?