A DIY Answer to Smartphone Monotony

Have you ever noticed how new technologies tend to arrive with all sorts of wild and interesting variations, then eventually coalesce around a similar final design? Early cars, for instance, came in all shapes and sizes, from three-wheelers to steam-powered models, but eventually standardized around the basic forms we see today. Smartphones have a similar story, from the Motorola Rokr with its built-in iTunes integration to the BlackBerry with its physical keyboard. Now it's all about touchscreens, minimal bezels, and AI-powered cameras inside a black rectangle.

Maybe this is for good reasons. The early designs tend to have a lot of problems and failures, so perhaps we are just standardizing on the best, most popular ideas. And look at what happens when device developers step way outside of established norms, like with the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5 and its folding screen. Yeah, a whole lot of broken displays and a terrible reputation. But even still, these unusual designs that break the mold tend to capture our interest far more than the same old stuff we have seen a million times.

It is for this reason that YouTuber Marcin Plaza decided to give the Galaxy Z Flip5 some special attention in a recent project. The folding screen may be a lost cause, but there is still a lot of good hardware there that can be repurposed. So Plaza decided to make an entirely new phone out of just the cover screen (the non-folding one that doesn’t break) and the internal hardware. With the addition of a physical keyboard scavenged from a BlackBerry, that half screen would have enough available real estate to be useful.

After coming up with a hinged design that exposes or hides the keyboard, Plaza got busy disassembling the stock phone. Next, he tossed aside everything that was not absolutely essential and designed a new case. After many iterations with a 3D-printed version to perfect the fit, an anodized aluminium version was produced.

For the most part, the existing hardware was just squeezed into the new case. However, there was no direct way to interface the BlackBerry keyboard with the Samsung hardware. To make things as simple as possible, Plaza developed a new flexible PCB that uses an Arduino-compatible Pro Micro development board. This translated the inputs and presented them to the phone as a standard USB keyboard.

The build was a lot of work, and the source of endless frustration, so it is not something that many people would want to repeat. Also, a lot of the phone’s hardware was tossed aside, so it is limited in its capabilities. But, there is no question that Plaza has developed something very cool and unique. Take that, little black rectangles!