Using ThinkPad T480 as a mobile phone | Hacker News Reader

Using ThinkPad T480 as a mobile phone

grego.site

130 pointsmarosgrego54 comments

most Android phones have a separate Android system running in the modem

Very strong doubt. They're usually running a RTOS. My experience has mainly been with Mediatek's, which use Nucleus Plus.

The OP may have confused things with the ultra-cheap USB modems which are actually a headless smartphone, and those do run Android: https://liliputing.com/this-dirt-cheap-4g-lte-modem-on-a-usb...

What about Qualcomm modems? It is the case for this one at least.

My experience has been that Qualcomm mobile phone chipsets don’t run Android on the modem side, but that standalone (ie laptop / USB / router) ones like this Quectel part sometimes do, in order to provide the userland components that run on the phone’s Android system / AP in a phone application. The actual basebands run an OS called REX usually.

Thanks, corrected it.

Think I've heard something about OKL4 but I wouldn't be sure.

I love the hackability of Thinkpads circa that generation.

it's incredibly repairable. I still use the t480 for modern workloads because I've been able to switch out the battery, the fan, the keyboard with fairly abundant aftermarket parts.

sadly my t480's usb c port is no longer able to charge the device, do you know of a way to fix it without replacing the mobo / getting god tier soldering skills? i'm kinda attached since i did a bunch of upgrades like two heatpipes and glass touchpad, sad to see my laptop from college die for a reason like the port dying

You probably have a bad Thunderbolt chip. No way around it besides SPI flash (which is honestly pretty easy):

https://gitlab.com/MobileAZN/lenovo-t480-thunderbolt-firmwar...

there's both the bad firmware issue and ports physically failing on a lot of t480s

I have the same issue. For all the talk of USB-C's supposed design for redirecting damage from the ports to the connector, it failed pretty badly here for probably thousands of people. Never had these issues with a barrel connector.

The problem I always had with barrel connectors is that they get loose, sometimes very quickly, and this experience has been near-universal. Even the more fancy barrel-with-center-pin connector found on some PowerPC PowerBooks and iBooks wasn’t immune.

USB-C is definitely no panacea when it comes to durability, though. I’ve had better luck with Lightening and wish the USB-C connector took more inspiration from it.

This happens often on old ones. Its kind of a consumable part unless you get a magnetic usb-c adaptor. the sub-board is replaceable but does need soldering....not god tier skills at all though, I think most people with some soldering experience could do it as it's just a few pins, but I guess it's not plug and play. It's really the one weakness in this model.

Pretty sure USB-C being on a sub-board only applies to t480s not t480.

On virtually all t480's I've seen having a broken USB-C port it was only the left one (some people don't even realize there are two!) so you can charge using the second one and since it has thunderbolt you could connect a dock and both charge and have e.g. a monitor on one port(obviously?).

On my current t480 I also succeeded in slightly bending the port shell tighter and using a USB-C cable with tighter tolerances to get the port to be usable for charging again, but it's a not guaranteed trial and error solution.

what a small world! i did the port bend thing after the issues first popped up, but eventually that stopped working as well.

interestingly, when i try to charge from right / thunderbolt port, it doesn't seem to work / the led doesn't turn on, and I saw another post with a thunderbolt flash guide that i might look into. thanks to you and everyone else who commented, i think i have a new sidequest to end the weekend with : )

There was an old version of firmware that would brick the thunderbolt port. Something about every connect/disconnect cycle would write tons to the port's eeprom eventually bricking it.

I don't think there is a fix, it's more a case of if your T480 still works, get a newer firmware installed asap.

yeah, same thing happened to my daily driver T480s, so I took precautions and now I use magnetic adapter on TB port since if that's gone whole computer is gone

I despise these new USB-C ports, never had such thing happen on proprietary Thinkpad ports over decades

ThinkPad T480 can be used as a fully featured mobile phone, supporting calls, SMS and mobile data.

Great hack! Is it possible to use a Bluetooth headset?

Of course! You can connect it to any audio source a sink. I had fun with piping music to phone calls with friends.

Nice, thanks!

Nice, I know these mainly had a spare NVMe slot right next to the WiFi, in case you had the optional WWAN adapter, and the essential SIM card holder itself is also there already regardless. The separate unused (apparently non-standardized) cellular antenna connectors are also there and taped off from the factory otherwise.

I would have never imagined that the Lenovo WWAN approach would not even support audio calling, good findings and excellent workaround :)

What I did was use a 2242 size NVMe SSD in that WWAN slot for extra storage, plugged in right next to the standard Wifi card.

Unfortunately I can not get this 500GB NVMe SSD to boot in the Lenovo WWAN slot, even though it works good in a regular NVMe SSD position. Even with functional boot files on the main working SSD which point to the proven OS on the NVMe in the WWAN slot.

Still good for additional SSD storage at least.

And it's good to know you figured out how to get WWAN calling working better than new on an older laptop, that's hacking that non-tech people can see how worthwhile it is :)

Great work! I have 4 t480s...and I buy new ones to cannibalize rather than replace the parts as works out to be still cheaper. they are the last of the period that still have an extra memory slot so can be upgraded and put to good everyday use.

This just makes it perfect as I only use the handphone for 2FA and no longer need the dying and hard(er) to find OnePlus 6/T

Thank you!

Is there an easy way to make any generic computer work as a phone without hacking it?

Plug in an EG25-G USB module. It has good driver suppport on linux as this is the same modem that's in the pinephone. About $60 plus the antennas. It also gives you GPS.

I'm actually working on this right now. I made a case for the module + antennas if you want.

EDIT: oops I hadn't read the article yet LOL. But the wisdom about the USB module still applies. There are also adapters for mpcie or m.2 or whatever modules to convert them to USB modules. Also you probably want to have a module or adapter with a sim card tray.

I bought mine off of aliexpress and also bought the LTE antennas. You need a separate antenna for GPS as well.

Lastly, with some of these adapters, the sim card goes in backwards relative to how you normally think it goes in. This had me stuck for a couple hours.

Alternatively you could use a GNU/Linux phone (Librem 5 or Pinephone), which allows to freely choose the OS and supports ordinary mobile use cases. It is small, but if you connect a screen and keyboard, you get the full PC.

Between a T480, Librem 5, or Pinephone, I wonder which is most powerful. I have a soft spot for my Pinephone, but fast it is not.

The T480 wins by a country mile.

It has whitelist for wireless cards ? That's just evil

Supposedly it's for FCC compliance. Makes perfect sense if you believe it, but I'm not super convinced.

Lenovo has whitelists for both wifi and cell cards. It's highly annoying.

A decade ago, I had a Lenovo Yoga 2. The Wi-Fi card it came with only supported 802.11g, or something old and outdated at the time. I learned about the whitelist the hard way when I bought a decently (then) up-to-date wifi card to upgrade, and the computer refused to boot.

But! I refuse to let a computer tell me no... So, after many many (too many) hours of reading forums, dumping firmware, flipping bits, and pushing firmware, I got the stupid card to work. And of course I took no notes, so if I had to do it again, I'd be starting from scratch.

Not just that, they restrict the WWAN slot to cell modem cards only.

This really sucks because it’s just mPCI and could host a number of other things. I used the WWAN slot on an old Dell Precision to adapt to a modern Intel WiFi+BT card for example (a 2008 laptop with WiFi 6E+BT 5!).

On my X1 Nano, the slot isn’t even wired to an antenna since I didn’t get the cell BTO option, so it’s present but totally useless thanks to the restriction. They could at least let me pop a second SSD in there…

> You can even use Android apps natively with Waydroid

Is that what's shown in the video? Or just another phone app that coincidentally looks like Android?

That's the gnome dialer, yeah.

Considering the size of current smartphones, using laptop as more compact alternative is quite clever idea.

A setup like this but in phone size would be ideal. The free software mobile world has really been a dumpster fire from the beginning.

That modem or a few others can be used with some of the small SBCs, which have a smartphone size or even a smaller size.

If you connect then to some battery pack with a USB charger, you have a mobile solution, though one more cumbersome than a real smartphone.

Yes, whoever can shrink this down to the size of something that would fit in your pocket would make a killing. Imagine not only being able to make phone calls, but use productivity software and even browse the internet.

A big issue is that the keyboard would take up valuable screen estate.

I can imagine it! It should be called the Imagine Phone, or iPhone for short.

Nope they just called it a smartphone when you could hook it up to your laptop and connect the phone by infrared, USB, or later Bluetooth when it appeared. Using the phone manufacturers software that was naturally free for Windows 98 but also W2K, XP and even Mac sometimes.

You really want the headphones when you're using the laptop as a phone because it can have audio feedback otherwise, especially if using the built-in laptop mic.

iPhones just weren't that smart when they finally arose, you did have to use your imagination but it wouldn't get you far in actual computer interaction like smartpones are supposed to, compared to a Motorola or Sony-Ericsson true smartphone.

You can only imagine how much better it would have been if more choices would have maintained their leadership and there were still other options besides only the relatively shoddy Android and iOS.

Yes, if those ran Free Software like a thinkpad they'd by amazing. Oh well.

May your wish be granted:

https://www.amazon.com/GPD-Pocket-LPDDR5X-Bluetooth-Handheld...

plus this: https://gpdstore.net/gpd-pocket-4-4g-lte-module/

I have been following this one for a while, but I have never seen anyone report on its status in linux.

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

The request said 'shrink it down,' it didn't also say, 'neuter it to 3 gigs of RAM and cut CPU and GPU performance to a small percentage of what it was such that many modern websites won't function.'

The T480 as a daily driver, while slow by current standards, would still meet the needs of many. I use mine often and with plenty of RAM and storage it's still very capable, if underpowered for some tasks.

Incessantly trying to make the Librem 5 happen, as if it's the answer to everyone's needs without a shred of practical reasoning, just makes the project look like a silly novelty.

Yes, shrinking things down has it's own costs and tradeoffs, what a surprise. Some people may find such tradeoffs suitable, in case the main features are still there. I do in this case.

Then actually state the specific costs and disadvantages when you respond if you have even a shred of interest in contributing anything remotely informative, so you're actually adding to the discussion versus consistently adding little more than noise.

Otherwise, you're just conducting a years-long, nearly endless amount of low-effort, shallow shilling of a commercial product here, as if it's the simple and pat answer to nearly every question asked, no matter how tangential or unviable, or more charitably, how particular a use case it serves.

Someone could complain about their 60 mile commute by car, and you'd say, "I really enjoy walking two blocks to work, you should buy these shoes," add nothing more, and then move on to do it to others several more times that day.

In a way it would almost be sad if you aren't getting paid by them to do this, because it's all so incredibly...measly.

> Then actually state the specific costs and disadvantages

Some of those are quite obvious and others are very subtle, so explaining everything is a waste of time. I do reply when someone asks additional questions.

> as if it's the simple and pat answer to nearly every question asked

I already mentioned to you earlier that this is not true and I comment whenever someone cares about the freedom of computing.

> In a way it would almost be sad if you aren't getting paid by them to do this, because it's all so incredibly...measly

Would you say the same about my years-long shilling of Qubes OS, too?

I still use my beloved t480 ... and there is still more amazing things it can do :) thank you!

Incredible. Thank you for posting that. What software do you use for phone calls?

Why not a SIP client like everyone else?

I’m disappointed in the lack of a Trigger Happy TV skit, but I’ll let it slide for reminding everyone that repairable laptops exist, and are still great

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