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Comment by kotaKat | Hacker News Reader

I noticed quite recently in awe at the Chinese parts recycling market with the N95 (and a few other old Nokias) - https://www.ebay.com/itm/227249518747

Apparently they've been rebuilding full "new" N95s and other Nokia fare from old motherboards and new spares/knockoff parts. It's like a new legitimate knockoff from the grey market? They've even got things like 'refurbed' N900s...

Mine came with a text message still in the inbox from testing it with a test SMS on China Mobile in 2025 - so even the modem works!

I'll have to give this a shot on my own N95.

https://leoncini.com.ar/proyecto.php?id=xash3d since it's not linked from TomsHardware.

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What is the purpose of refurbishing old phones like this? Is it just to sell to enthusiasts/collectors? In most of the world, 3G has been shut down and 2G is either already shut down or in the process of being shut down, so you wouldn't be able to get much practical use out of the phone.

fun thing is a bunch of hobbyists are running around with SDRs and old cell hardware and running low power experimental cell networks in their houses, questionable legality be damned.

OpenBTS/YateBTS/OsmoBTS and friends are useful here to spin up a working network and relive a happier time.

I've been meaning to get one of the tiny SDR cards like an XRTX and place it into a Pi or similar device and build a "mobile mobile hotspot" - LTE/5G in, 2G/3G out for old crap.

EDIT: I almost forgot, too. The N95 has Wi-Fi and a SIP client, so it's not completely useless even in 2026!

That's actually a very interesting idea - do you have any good resources for setting this up ?

There are some cars that can only access 3G for certain features and it would be cool to test around and see what my vehicle can do and if I want to disable it for reliability reasons

802.11b/g :(

54Mbps is enough for anyone!

My powerful Android tablet is limited to 72mbps link due to a quirk with the way the XDA developer implemented wifi support on the lineageos branch of my tablet, meaning the device can't see the region specific 5ghz band of the modem of my ISP is outputting, so it can only connect to the 2,4ghz band of that SSID meaning it's stuck to 72mbps.

And despite this, it works ok for what I used it: Brave web browsing, youtube via newpipe, Plex and Jellyfin streaming.

Like I'm bummed I don't get the Gigabit and Wifi 6 speeds of the router and my internet plan is theoretically capable of, but somehow 72mbps seems sufficient in most of my use cases of that device so .. yay advanced video codecs I guess!?.

I get like 15-50 mbps down on my iPhone 16 when I'm on 5g... and that's enough to stream music, youtube, use as a hotspot, etc.

sometimes if I'm lucky i'll get much higher speeds but I guess being in a city with 100s of thousands of other people within a few miles of me means I have to do with like 40 mbps

The biggest negative about having slow clients using older, less efficient wifi generations is they end up making the network slower for everyone else who could be faster on that same channel.

Yeah I know, but I can't control it.

Live a little, allow horribly inefficient delightful retro device clients on a 2.4 GHz channel :)

WEP is where I’d personally draw the line, but the N95 fortunately supports WPA.

I set up an isolated network on my LAN with its own WAP to play with my old devices that don't support WPA. I don't leave it on all the time and the network segmentation limits any blast damage. Works well since I have so much old crap with early WiFi.

> OpenBTS/YateBTS/OsmoBTS and friends are useful here to spin up a working network and relive a happier time.

Indeed, but good luck setting something like that up and not upset a legitimate cell tower or other user of a frequency band that can be spoken by LTE equipment.

SIP over Wi-Fi was so amazing on Symbian. Free international phone calls over Eduroam long before mobile Skype was a thing!

I've been playing with asterisk and SIP and I'd like a simple device that would allow a to b contact on their end if only in select locations.

So, thanks for this edit, because I now have the plan -- Dad gets to geek out and they get simple texting / calling but none of the other related phone bullshit. I'm pumped!

It's probably just old stocks and newly built surplus parts. People don't care too much about book values of unsold items in parts markets in China and/or third world Asian countries.

Tell you what though, I would jump on a modern N95. I only really want a basic phone with a good camera, and sure, Python. Only need LTE and a thinner form factor.

Have you checked the fair phone?

I don’t want the rat race of modern smartphones. I want an appliance.

I'm not the person that you replied to, but I have. I bought a FP3 and it's waiting in my drawer until the last 2G network goes down. I'm using my N86 until then.

I want/need a phone that I can answer with one hand without looking at the screen and can record phone calls automatically so don't have to search for pen and paper all the time. No current phone is capable of these two things.

Basically any Android phone where you can gain root access is capable, you can set up automatic recording of every call and set answering call with a button (like Volume Up).

> answering call with a button (like Volume Up)

Are you sure? I didn't find that option on FP3.

Don't know about FP3 specifically, but on some phones it's built-in in accessibility settings (all Samsung phones for example). For other phones you can try an app such as Button Mapper and assign "accept call" to a button.

I was big into dumbphones about 10-15 years ago and the problem with dumbphones is the same problem with dumbtv and other ones, is that the market is already small, and those in the market for these things are opinionated as shit about the specific configuration they want. So you are presented probably with maybe 2, 3 viable options if you are lucky, none are the thing that satisfies your actual needs, and they are all overpriced as shit because they have no competition because the market is so niche. So you probably end up buying the closest configuration possible to what you want and then spend your experience being slightly annoyed that it’s not fully there.

N95 was considered a smartphone at the time.

Devices with Symbian were smartphones.

Dumb objects are not totally niche. No one actually likes smarts that impede the core function. The Slate truck strips a lot of this out.

The trick with phones, since the smarts are a core function, is not making them dumb, but more akin to a PC. Less convenience served on a platter, more freedom to develop and install just what you want without compromising on UX. The N95 and other Symbian phones did this for me.

As Nokia Alumni, I would be happy with a Symbian Belle device like the C7 instead, but get the feeling, N95 was quite good as well.

> I would jump on a modern N95

Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5.

N900 was a crazy phone, ahead of its time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9CFrJnCKqU

At that time I had a flip phone maybe a black berry curve so not aware of it

Laggy as hell and shit battery, but it was pretty sweet to be able to ssh into my own box lol

I would love a modern version of the N900/N810. If I could get one with a recent ARM processor, good slide out keyboard, and running a more desktop-oriented Linux install (meaning more hacking/developer friendly than just Android), I'd be seriously tempted. Sadly, I assume the current component prices would mean it would be too expensive to be realistic.

I'd buy an N810 formfactor right now with modern guts.

Funny I tried to buy one of those breakout blackberry keyboards but they were sold out everywhere

This with DisplayPort Alt-Mode so it can be docked for desktop use is pretty much my dream device.

Not ARM but checkout the PinePhone, its also pretty much sold at cost (same as most Pine products)

Doesn’t it use an ARM CPU?

Yes; https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone#Specifications lists an Allwinner A64

The Pine Phone is cool, but the slide out keyboard on the N900/N810 was a big selling point for me.

Funny I was a supporter of their devices I bought both phones, laptop, tablets... Issue is the software man no drivers. Like the e-ink tablet had a great design/screen but the brush stroke was ass would leave dotted lines as you drew then it would render solid on lift up.

I'm complaining even though I'm not writing the drivers myself I get that.

Then you may want to pay a bit more and get a Librem 5.

The FxTec Pro 1 is the closest I've found these days; it has a slied-out keyboard and an unlocked bootloader so you can run LineageOS or Ubuntu Touch (PMOS support seems spotty).

The keyboard isn't as nice as those on phones from ~2010; it's a bit too big for the thumbs to really fly and sliding it in & out is not as effortless as it should be, but nless you count Unihertz's blackberry-likes, there's really nothing else around that comes close!

> They've even got things like 'refurbed' N900s

As an original N900 user, I got one of the eBay "refurbed" N900s from China I think a few years ago for fun. It was a piece of junk, literally, like arrived with broken keyboard etc. A clear case of false advertising. I got a full refund.

YMMV. I was really thinking I was buying a proper refurbed N900. Maybe they're out there. Buyer beware.

I had an N900 when it came out, after falling in love with the N810, one of my favorite devices to this day, I'd buy a new one with modern guts in a heartbeat. The N900 was junk. The build quality was terrible and the software was half baked. Right after it released Nokia said they were cancelling everything about it and pretended to care about software going forward but didn't. In the VERY short time I had one I had the ear piece speaker break (common), the magnets fall out (also common), the screen slide break (also common!), and even when it worked the slide felt janky and the OS was extremely slow. They never fixed MMS, despite promises.

I loved the n900 daily from mid-late 2010 to ~mid-2012. Text editor on "Debian". "Desktop" Firefox. Terminal. Maps. Some decent other apps: a good drawing app that I used on the train a lot for whiteboarding.

I liked Maemo 5. Having never used the n810 nor Maemo 4, I suppose didn't know what I was missing.

iPhone did not get copy-paste until mid-2009!

Eventually my n900's microSD jack broke off the board, which I've read was common.

This reminds me of 3.5 inch floppy drives. They were last manufactured in 2011. You can still buy "new" ones where they pull internal drives from old corporate machines and then wrap them in a new plastic enclosure with USB converter board to make them an external drive.

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