{"id":128670,"date":"2025-09-03T02:41:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T02:41:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/128670\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T02:41:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T02:41:06","slug":"phonenstien-flips-broken-samsung-into-qwerty-slider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/128670\/","title":{"rendered":"Phonenstien Flips Broken Samsung Into QWERTY Slider"},"content":{"rendered":"

The phone ecosystem these days is horribly boring compared to the innovation of a couple decades back. Your options include flat rectangles, and flat rectangles that fold in half and then break. [Marcin Plaza] wanted to think outside the slab, without reinventing the wheel. In an inspired bout of hacking, he flipped a broken Samsung zFlip 5 into a \u201cnew\u201d phone.<\/a><\/p>\n

There\u2019s really nothing new in it; the guts all come from the donor phone. That screen? It\u2019s the front screen that was on the top half of the zFlip, as you might have guessed from the cameras. Normally that screen is only used for notifications, but with the Samsung\u2019s fancy folding OLED dead as Disco that needed to change. Luckily for [Marcin] Samsung has an app called Good Lock that already takes care of that. A little digging about in the menus is all it takes to get a launcher and apps on the small screen.<\/p>\n

Because this is a modern phone, the whole thing is glued together, but that\u2019s not important since [Marcin] is only keeping the screen and internals from the Samsung. The new case with its chunky four-bar linkage is a custom design fabbed out in CNC\u2019d aluminum. (After a number of 3D Printed prototypes, of course. Rapid prototyping FTW!)<\/p>\n

The bottom half of the slider contains a Blackberry Q10 keyboard, along with a battery and Magsafe connector. The Q10 keyboard is connected to a custom flex PCB with an Arduino Micro Pro that is moonlighting as a Human Input Device. Sure, that means the phone\u2019s USB port is used by the keyboard, but this unit has wireless charging,so that\u2019s not a great sacrifice. We particularly like the use of magnets to create a satisfying \u201csnap\u201d when the slider opens and closes.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, as much as we might love this concept, [Marcin] doesn\u2019t feel the design is solid enough to share the files. While that\u2019s disappointing, we can certainly relate to his desire to change it up in an era of endless flat rectangles<\/a>.\u00a0 This project is a lot more work than just turning a broken phone into a server,<\/a>\u00a0but it also seems like a lot more fun.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The phone ecosystem these days is horribly boring compared to the innovation of a couple decades back. Your…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128671,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[165,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-128670","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-mobile","9":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}