Hacking the T-Mobile Sidekick, 20 Years Too Late | Hacker News Reader

Hacking the T-Mobile Sidekick, 20 Years Too Late

x86.cx

51 pointsmicrocode15 comments

The vibrant and varied mobile market the Sidekick lived in feels so alien now. I'm still shocked that Danger, the company that made the Sidekick, were acquired by MS and made a next gen version... which was promptly canned within weeks of launch:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin

That thing was so cursed because it was in the dark "inbetween" times of Windows Mobile 6.5 (and how desperately it was trying to cling onto) and WP7 (that they thought was going to kill Apple).

But damnit, the Kin ONE was a beautiful form factor and I loved that pebble. The software was terrible and I always wish I could have bailed it out to a generic CE desktop to make it do more dumb things.

Microsoft really messed up with their mobile OS by not treating touchscreen as the primary input and display method.

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

You could potentially use it as a security camera with some modifications or turn it in to a webcam. That phone probably has a better camera than 90% of laptops and cheap security cameras.

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.

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.

> 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.

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)

> practically unusable

Hey, as one of the people that flashed Android onto one of my old HTC Windows Mobile phones and tried to daily it, I resent that!

(We used to make it work in the 1.6-2.x era...)

This is so cool and the visual novel wow

Very cool! How did you think of this?

tuff af ur brain works different

Now if someone could just unearth a copy of Blackberry Internet Services (the proper BIS, not the enterprise BES) to get ancient Blackberries online again...

Wow that’s be fun actually…

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