JIRKA MADE ME PULL MY PHONE APART
I'm a bit scatter-brained today. It sort of creeps up on me with
days like this, it's not to the end of the day when you're looking
back at all the time you've wasted, things you've stuffed up, and
times you've almost fallen over that you realise, particularly in
light of a contradictorary self-assuredness (which doesn't care how
those words are spelt), that you're not quite yourself. Taking a
break from that run-on sentence to dance to the randomly selected
tracker module from new-year 1998 that your PC started playing is
another hint. BIG HINT: there's a phone next to you that you pulled
apart this morning. Why'd you do that? Oh yeah, some guy on the
internet was asking about the CPU/RAM specs of the phones people
use, so of course when it wasn't in the specs list...
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jirka/Phlog/2022_07_01.txt
Hey it's not like I jumped at the screwdrivers straight away
though, this was just early in the day after all. Sure it's not in
the specs lists, like here:
https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_a411-2138.php
But it's also not in the manual, which I do still have along with
the box, Win 2000/XP driver CD, cables I've never used, receipts,
and first SIM card, because I keep all this junk. Plus the phone
itself doesn't say it _anywhere_ in its menus. Oh and Samsung
didn't have official public names for their phone OSs back then, so
there's no min. specs, target architectures, etc. stuff. Then
there's the FCC certification documents, but they bothered to get
them to keep all the interesting specs stuff quiet, and the
internal pictures were too blury to see the chip markings. I mean
right now I'm thinking "hack the FCC!", but nah this was earlier
and I hadn't got quite that bad yet, so I just pulled the phone
cover off and looked over the ships directly.
SoC is a Qualcomm MSM627S. Hmm doesn't exist. No, MSM6275, hard to
read where they'd put a sticker over it, OK here we go:
https://archive.org/details/qualcomm_msm6275_docs
225MHz ARM926EJ-S. Wah! Over 100MHz, Jirka was asking about 100MHz
- I've pulled my phone apart and I don't even get to send some guy
an email about it?! Ha well there's still RAM - the block diagram
shows it's connected externally along with flash. There's a
memory-ish chip next to the SoC, printed over with a presumed
firmware number, so probably flash but there's no obvious RAM chip
near by. Samsung K5D1G13DCA-D090, which is some internal part that
they don't have public datasheets for. But various generic-looking
online stores always want to sell you these parts anyway for some
reason, and one of these dubious sellers actually attempts a
description as "MCP 1G Nand / 512M Mobile SDRAM". Huh, NAND Flash
and SDRAM on the same chip, makes sense I suppose. The phone only
has 54MB flash storage, but 1G/8 (because memory chip specs are
always in bits instead of bytes, because like who are Samsung to
presume your byte width, yeah and it looks bigger) = 128MB so maybe
Samsung are actually wasteful enough to fill 74MB with OS data?
Anyway that leaves 512M/8 = 64MB - under 128MB baby, I'm in the
club. Rock on (to err... "-= Abandoned =- composed by Rage
19/Jun/1995 Finland")! Woo! Meh, I'm not in the mood for sending
emails now.
Oh yeah I was going to put this link in for the chip:
https://www.jotrin.com/product/parts/K5D1G13DCA_D090
Ha, fooled you! I mean I actually have two of these phones and I
pulled apart the spare, so umm, yeah. They're 3G of course so
they'll be useless by this time next year anyway once that's turned
off here in Aus, like my whole collection of old 2G phones. 4G
phones only seem to exist in the annoying modern smartphony world
where specs are not only published but actually seem to matter. I
miss the old mobile phones from back when average people probably
didn't even realise there was a computer in them. Actually I pulled
apart the RF unit from an old AMPS car phone once - weird how all
that and more gets stuffed into this one little circuit board. I
only keep the phone in my car actually, which itself used to have a
car phone in it once, but that was before I owned it, and maybe
before I was born. I don't want people calling me when I'm out of
the house, I barely put up with them calling my landline, the phone
in my car is just for when I break down, or crash, or want to
confuse people by being way too young to be the sort of person who
still uses a flip-phone.
I guess it would be fun to build a DIY 4G car phone, but then it
would only last until everything switched to 5G. I'm building a
cloud charge monitor instead at the moment - what better way to
watch a lightning storm than on a large ~1950s panel meter? So I'm
off to check my wiring and assemble that while watching music
videos on Rage. Guess I'll put that phone back together tomorrow.
Bye.
- The Free Thinker (mellowed out a bit over the course of this
phlog post)
Oh and hey this mid-90s PC I'm posting from is only 120MHz with
80MB RAM, so it's like Jirka's workstation too. But it's not cool
like an SGI, it's just the old nameless-brand Pentium beige box
that was once the library book cataloging computer at my old
primary school. It's got a SID chip in it now though, so that's
cool. OK, no SIDs now though, Rage time. My TV ain't got 128MB RAM
either, it's from the 90s too. Probably should set up something
better that its mono audio for nights like this though.
Fixed my washing machine by the way.
