Found a 2008 flip phone in my dad's garage and it still turned on

Stopped by my dad's place in Akron last Saturday to help him clean out the garage and found his old Motorola Razr sitting in a shoe box with a bunch of other junk. Figured the battery would be swollen or dead for good after all that time in the cold and dust, but I plugged it into a wall charger I had from an old pawn shop grab and it actually booted up. The screen had this weird green glow and the keypad numbers were confusing after using touchscreens for so long, but the menu still worked and I found a few texts from 2009 that never got deleted. It reminded me how easy repairs used to be, you could pop the back off and swap a battery in seconds without any tools or heat guns. Now my current phone has a cracked charging port and I'm looking at a 45 minute teardown with like 17 different screwdrivers just to check the flex cable. Has anyone else messed with an old device just to see if it still works, or is this just what we do when we get bored?

1 comments

1 Comment

ward.fiona3d ago

I mean, yeah, it's kind of neat it booted up, but you're basically digging through a garage because you were bored, that's the whole story here. The nostalgia for easy repairs is nice, but a cracked charging port on a modern phone is a different beast than a 12 year old Razr that just needed a charge.