I was thinking along the lines of opening up an old phone eg, the NM95, it's a risc / omap processor it's only 300hz or something but hacking the circuit board and using the pins out, what's the practicality of making a small computer and screen using an old phone and using the CPU?...

Failing that, anyone seen any computers running on low power RISC/ARM processors?

 

Due to the extremely high density construction, it's nearly impossible to use the phone's circuit board for a general purpose computer. Often, encryption is employed in most signal lines to prevent reverse engineering. The JTAG programming port(s) may be spread around the board, or there may be more than one, so identifying that is also difficult.

The best use of old phones is simply for scavenging the display, if it is a documented interface, such as a few Nokia models. If the ribbon wire leading to the display is over 30 lines wide, it's not usually worth it to re-purpose as a display for a PIC, as an example.

The GLCD in greyscale from Nokia is a great panel to find. There's usually a few of them on eBay. Those work great with projects made with a PIC, AVR, or FPGA embedded system.

I think the Nokia N500 is a "net tablet" that can be loaded with different OS, like the Droid phones and DSO Nano scopes. As stated, not much to change in the actual phone portions.

 

This seems to be very close to a duplicate thread...

old smartphones...

 

That's because it is, i posted it thinking i was in the general posts section and when i noticed it vanished i thought i must have closed it by accident so i rewrote my question again not knowing it's here..

feel free to delete it (any mod/admin) ty