Pea Bee #8: GT-I5800
Only a few days back, I heard the news that Blackberry has finally died. I never had a Blackberry myself. The first "smartphone" I bought was an Android, back in 2010 - a day before leaving home for college. It was one of the earlier android phones manufactured by Samsung called GT-I5800. I bought it from a little-known book-selling website at the time called Flipkart. They had just expanded to selling electronic items.
I am not going to lie, the first few months in college were difficult. I struggled to come to terms with this new life and place, full of new and unknown characters. But the enthusiasm of exploring this flashy new phone, occupied my mind a lot of the time. In some ways, this helped me cope in those initial weeks. Mobile phone tech was going through a revolution at the time. And with this little device in my hand, it felt like I too was part of it. I used this phone throughout my college years. Scoured online forums to find cool things to do with it - how to get root access, install custom ROMs & boot loaders, all kinds of customizations. It helped that Android was so much more open at the time. That allowed indie devs and hackers to build all sorts of cool stuff with it.
By 2014 though, my phone’s age had started to show. The tech was moving so fast. I moved to another better and faster phone. But I still kept this phone, I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.
Fast forward to now, one random day, on a whim, I decided to see if the phone still worked. Though I was almost certain I won’t be able to switch it on - but what do I know, it worked! Seeing that slow and beautiful Android boot animation almost teared me up. Hello again, old friend!
But it was passcode protected and I did not remember the code. I tried many different combinations but I could not crack what the younger me had chosen. I googled ways to bypass the passcode but my phone was so old and obscure that I could not find any solution. I then set a custom range for google search results from 2010-2014 and finally found an article that offered some help.
Turns out, I only needed to connect my phone to my computer, then using a command-line tool (adb), go to the directory on my phone where passcodes are stored - and, umm, just delete the passcode file. That’s it, I rebooted my phone and the passcode was gone. I was finally able to enter the phone! With the 02022 lenses on, it's laughable how easy it was to enter someone’s android phone back in the day - acche din!
I felt a little nostalgic browsing this phone again. There weren’t too many obvious apps installed. The browser history was empty (Opera Mini!), no pics in the Gallery, no Whatsapp, no Facebook - I must’ve deleted them. There were many apps I didn’t recognize and some that look so different now. Saw my call logs from 8 years ago - people I’ve since lost all contacts with. A few notes in the notepad app that I no longer understand. Surprisingly though, there were many text messages - not deleted probably because I couldn’t find a way to back them up? I don’t know, but I read some of them again. Cringed and laughed at them - yeah, but on reflection, I wasn’t so uncool after all back then!
Here are a couple of pics of the phone:
While browsing the phone, it struck me that sometimes, our own memories become our blind spots. Many things were not as shit as I remember them and some things, not as great as I think they were. I was a product of my own biases of the time, I guess - and I am glad, with this exercise, I got to re-evaluate some of them memories again.
In my previous newsletter, I talked about letting go of my broken laptop. But I will still keep this phone. And attempt to switch it on again in another 10 years' time. Who knows, the evaluation of my past self by my current self may need some re-evaluation from my future self!