Running Android Pie on a 20-Year-Old Dumb Phone

It is hard to accept that true smartphones have only been commonplace for a little over a decade. We use our smartphones for everything these days and a world without them is almost unfathomable. But unless you're very young, you remember the sad, featureless dumb phones of the late '90s and early '00s. Even the Motorola Razr, which was one of the most popular cell phones ever made, struggled to pull up a simple webpage on its pathetic low-resolution screen. But what if you could use an old dumb phone like a modern smartphone? Befinitiv has pulled that off by running Android Pie on a 20-year-old dumb phone.

Android Pie is the ninth major release of the mobile operating system and it has been available since 2018. If you have any smartphone that isn't an iPhone, there is a good chance that it is running Android Pie. As such, the OS is capable of doing everything that a modern smartphone should. You can use it to surf the internet, use apps, send emails, and so on. But those tasks require quite a lot of horsepower. For example, the Essential Phone, which was the first third-party smartphone to get the Android Pie update, had a Snapdragon 835 SoC (System-on-Chip) with an octa-core processor, dedicated GPU, and 4GB of RAM. The Sony CMD-Z5 used for this project, on the other hand, stood out just for having a color screen.

There is no possible way for Android Pie (or any other version of Android) to run on the Sony CMD-Z5's limited hardware. That's why Befinitiv ditched that hardware and replaced it with something more modern. All that they kept of the original phone was the plastic enclosure and the keyboard—and the keyboard isn't functional. The internal electronic components were replaced by a Gocomma W5, which is a cheap sub-$100 smartwatch. While the W5 is cheap, it is essentially a small smartphone. It has a touchscreen, 4G connectivity, Bluetooth, WiFi, and more. Befinitiv disassembled the W5 and rearranged its parts inside of the Sony CMD-Z5's case. The smartwatch's small touchscreen fits quite well in place of the original 96x72 pixel screen. Very few of the original buttons work, but the power button is functional. Befinitiv even repurposed the volume wheel as a scroll wheel. This is a great way to get that hipster dumb phone street cred without giving up the convenience of modern apps.