I noticed quite recently in awe at the Chinese parts recycling market with the N95 (and a few other old Nokias) - https://www.ebay.com/itm/227249518747
Apparently they've been rebuilding full "new" N95s and other Nokia fare from old motherboards and new spares/knockoff parts. It's like a new legitimate knockoff from the grey market? They've even got things like 'refurbed' N900s...
Mine came with a text message still in the inbox from testing it with a test SMS on China Mobile in 2025 - so even the modem works!
What is the purpose of refurbishing old phones like this? Is it just to sell to enthusiasts/collectors? In most of the world, 3G has been shut down and 2G is either already shut down or in the process of being shut down, so you wouldn't be able to get much practical use out of the phone.
Tell you what though, I would jump on a modern N95. I only really want a basic phone with a good camera, and sure, Python. Only need LTE and a thinner form factor.
It's probably just old stocks and newly built surplus parts. People don't care too much about book values of unsold items in parts markets in China and/or third world Asian countries.
fun thing is a bunch of hobbyists are running around with SDRs and old cell hardware and running low power experimental cell networks in their houses, questionable legality be damned.
OpenBTS/YateBTS/OsmoBTS and friends are useful here to spin up a working network and relive a happier time.
I've been meaning to get one of the tiny SDR cards like an XRTX and place it into a Pi or similar device and build a "mobile mobile hotspot" - LTE/5G in, 2G/3G out for old crap.
EDIT: I almost forgot, too. The N95 has Wi-Fi and a SIP client, so it's not completely useless even in 2026!
That's actually a very interesting idea - do you have any good resources for setting this up ?
There are some cars that can only access 3G for certain features and it would be cool to test around and see what my vehicle can do and if I want to disable it for reliability reasons
> OpenBTS/YateBTS/OsmoBTS and friends are useful here to spin up a working network and relive a happier time.
Indeed, but good luck setting something like that up and not upset a legitimate cell tower or other user of a frequency band that can be spoken by LTE equipment.
I would love a modern version of the N900/N810. If I could get one with a recent ARM processor, good slide out keyboard, and running a more desktop-oriented Linux install (meaning more hacking/developer friendly than just Android), I'd be seriously tempted. Sadly, I assume the current component prices would mean it would be too expensive to be realistic.
As an original N900 user, I got one of the eBay "refurbed" N900s from China I think a few years ago for fun. It was a piece of junk, literally, like arrived with broken keyboard etc. A clear case of false advertising. I got a full refund.
YMMV. I was really thinking I was buying a proper refurbed N900. Maybe they're out there. Buyer beware.
I had an N900 when it came out, after falling in love with the N810, one of my favorite devices to this day, I'd buy a new one with modern guts in a heartbeat. The N900 was junk. The build quality was terrible and the software was half baked. Right after it released Nokia said they were cancelling everything about it and pretended to care about software going forward but didn't. In the VERY short time I had one I had the ear piece speaker break (common), the magnets fall out (also common), the screen slide break (also common!), and even when it worked the slide felt janky and the OS was extremely slow. They never fixed MMS, despite promises.
Oooh! I fondly remember my N95! Pictures and movies it took were great, at least for the time, and it had apps and a lot of stuffs like a browser that were presented as new on the phone space when the first iPhone was released, while I had my N95 for almost a year at this time. Symbian was a really nice system.
Shame Valve still hasn't open-sourced the GoldSource engine yet, though I suppose Nexon and the Sven Coop lead dev have paid licenses that they still want to extract value from.
Yeah that's just the game logic which has been out since 1999. The rendering/networking/animation/UI/sound etc stuff is all still closed source (though apparently there is a leak from a Counter-Strike Online developer circulating among private hands - some code was contributed to Xash3D which perfectly implemented a non-trivial scripting system which was suspicious enough that it was removed).
Isn't that because a lot of GoldSrc was idTech-derived enough that the legality of open sourcing it is trapped in contract law limbo? Even though those years of the idTech engine itself are now also open source, the contracts at the time did not plan for that and it is likely at this point that solving those contracts would be a 3-way legal question between Microsoft (ActiVision because of Vivendi/Sierra, Half-Life's original publisher), Microsoft (Bethesda because of inheriting idTech), and Valve, with the obviously problem in the way of that Valve and Microsoft have a complex history and aren't likely to want to get into a legal discussion if they can help it.
I seem to recall a fan project trying to take idTech's open source and recreate GoldSrc's fork from it by trying to reverse engineer from the parts of Half Life that are open source but not having much luck because the divergence was strong enough in some places to be somewhat impenetrable without some other Rosetta Stone.
The Doom source code was originally released under a non-commercial license that was weirdly restrictive and it was eventually re-released under GPL. The Quake source code was released under GPL from the beginning.
If Valve really wanted to release HL1/GoldSrc source code, they could re-base to the GPL quake source code and release their changes as GPL as well. This would be a miserable job because the remaining quake code is probably scattered across the codebase in weird orphaned fragments, but afaik it would be completely legal.
e: oh yeah if the shambling zombie that is Sierra still holds any rights over HL1 then god knows what the IP situation is with that property
They bought the HL1 rights back from Sierra in the early 2000s. The real problem is that the code is not in a distributable state and nobody at Valve feels like working on putting it into a distributable state ( https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife/issues/1712#issuec... ):
> A while back Valve [had] a partner perforce server that had depots of the source files for both gold source and source that were shared with development partners and some mod teams. This server had a major meltdown and those depots were lost. At the time there was no requests and no activity around gold source development. Resources to rebuild the depots did not exist and still don't so that code is just not available. Once a year someone talks about maybe pulling it together to open source it but once again there are not resources to do the actual work need to package it up. The Sven Co-op team was luck in that there was a package and someone to make it available to them, that does not exist today.
And it was based on Debian. Installing an "app" was quite literally installing a deb package. Back in the day, I was working at a mobile software company and they had to call the IT guy (i.e. me) to explain how packaging works in Debian, just for the new Nokia they sent us, about a month before official launch. I tought the gadget was adorable.
I had this phone when it was released. I really loved it. But one thing I remember the most was using it as fidgeting toy. Just opening and closing it. So satisfying.
332 MHz Dual ARM 11 ?!
Half-Life ran smooth in Pentium 100 single core.
Then, they added Steam, and my Celeron 300 had trouble running it. Shit by Valve to coule games with a mandatory subscriber agreement. Even breaks EU law to "one-sided change" it again and again later, to keep access to your game library.
Yeah, I remember playing it on a P233MHz without a 3D graphics card... It was sort of playable, but any alpha-blended effects like muzzle flashes or explosions slowed it to single-digit FPS for a second :D Still, I played it through like that. Today's gamers complain if a game momentarily drops below 60fps or whatever.
Apparently they've been rebuilding full "new" N95s and other Nokia fare from old motherboards and new spares/knockoff parts. It's like a new legitimate knockoff from the grey market? They've even got things like 'refurbed' N900s...
Mine came with a text message still in the inbox from testing it with a test SMS on China Mobile in 2025 - so even the modem works!
I'll have to give this a shot on my own N95.
https://leoncini.com.ar/proyecto.php?id=xash3d since it's not linked from TomsHardware.
OpenBTS/YateBTS/OsmoBTS and friends are useful here to spin up a working network and relive a happier time.
I've been meaning to get one of the tiny SDR cards like an XRTX and place it into a Pi or similar device and build a "mobile mobile hotspot" - LTE/5G in, 2G/3G out for old crap.
EDIT: I almost forgot, too. The N95 has Wi-Fi and a SIP client, so it's not completely useless even in 2026!
There are some cars that can only access 3G for certain features and it would be cool to test around and see what my vehicle can do and if I want to disable it for reliability reasons
Indeed, but good luck setting something like that up and not upset a legitimate cell tower or other user of a frequency band that can be spoken by LTE equipment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9CFrJnCKqU
At that time I had a flip phone maybe a black berry curve so not aware of it
As an original N900 user, I got one of the eBay "refurbed" N900s from China I think a few years ago for fun. It was a piece of junk, literally, like arrived with broken keyboard etc. A clear case of false advertising. I got a full refund.
YMMV. I was really thinking I was buying a proper refurbed N900. Maybe they're out there. Buyer beware.
Shame Valve still hasn't open-sourced the GoldSource engine yet, though I suppose Nexon and the Sven Coop lead dev have paid licenses that they still want to extract value from.
[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife
I seem to recall a fan project trying to take idTech's open source and recreate GoldSrc's fork from it by trying to reverse engineer from the parts of Half Life that are open source but not having much luck because the divergence was strong enough in some places to be somewhat impenetrable without some other Rosetta Stone.
The Doom source code was originally released under a non-commercial license that was weirdly restrictive and it was eventually re-released under GPL. The Quake source code was released under GPL from the beginning.
If Valve really wanted to release HL1/GoldSrc source code, they could re-base to the GPL quake source code and release their changes as GPL as well. This would be a miserable job because the remaining quake code is probably scattered across the codebase in weird orphaned fragments, but afaik it would be completely legal.
e: oh yeah if the shambling zombie that is Sierra still holds any rights over HL1 then god knows what the IP situation is with that property
> A while back Valve [had] a partner perforce server that had depots of the source files for both gold source and source that were shared with development partners and some mod teams. This server had a major meltdown and those depots were lost. At the time there was no requests and no activity around gold source development. Resources to rebuild the depots did not exist and still don't so that code is just not available. Once a year someone talks about maybe pulling it together to open source it but once again there are not resources to do the actual work need to package it up. The Sven Co-op team was luck in that there was a package and someone to make it available to them, that does not exist today.
I still like to think of a parallel time line where Symbian actually had a good and usable app store, and developers had been supported.
Went with an iPhone 3GS.
Still think about that from time to time. I don't regret it, per-se, as the jailbreak scene at the time was very exciting.
It ran Maemo 5, and I still miss it even though I never owned one myself. Unfortunately Nokia fumbled everything.
Before my time but I remember an old colleague saying how hard it was to find decent documentation for Symbian development.
Then, they added Steam, and my Celeron 300 had trouble running it. Shit by Valve to coule games with a mandatory subscriber agreement. Even breaks EU law to "one-sided change" it again and again later, to keep access to your game library.