Yeah, I remember the early PSP days. Version 1.00 from the JPN market allowed unsigned code to run, but only in user mode. Which allowed researchers to gain full access later on.
10:04 Yes, it's Polish. Seems that author changed some strings though, because "Network search" is literally replaced with "Looking for p*ssy". Some other labels are also replaced to be "cool": "Zapodaj" in menu is hard to translate, as it's slang term similar to "gimme some".
Unbelievable. I love the vibrancy of the eastern European modding scene of that time. I remember glimpsing at one or even two displays of modded phones (in public transportation for example) during my teens in Greece in the early 2000s. Janus i also adore every aspect of your videos, from the edit to your characteristic monotonic intonation, elaborate wording and lovely outros. It's always a treat.
Some Russian/Ukrainian hackers even created a "Vampire Phone" by modding the ROM of a Motorola DPC analog phone which was able to scan the control channels and stole ESN/mobile number pairs on the fly for making free calls. It's was crazy back then. :D
I made a couple of minor mistakes in this one. Such as saying the birds in the tree were cats. Also maybe some others I have not spotted yet. But I wanted to get this out in about a week as promised. And I'm sure there's nothing that breaks the story. I hope you enjoy the deeper look into this amazing phone :)
Janus! I have a Sony Ericsson w995i in really good condition. I recall you saying that you would like to get one... Let me know and I will ship it to you 👍
SL45 was my first mobile phone. I also seen moded SL45 with blue screen & buttons. Also check out the phone Motorola E680 it's Linux OS with stylus. That phone had so many soft mods I loved that smart phone in 2004 I remember I flashed the firmware to E680i although Motorola said it can't be done but Internet forums had me covered on that one. Great video, subscribed!
Some Russian/Ukrainian hackers even created a "Vampire Phone" by modding the ROM of a Motorola DPC analog phone which was able to scan the control channels to steal ESN/mobile number pairs on the fly for making free calls. It's was crazy back then. :D
@JanusCycle Android doesn't allow rotating the screen to reverse potrait, sometimes the charging port at the bottom makes it difficult to use the phone while it is charging. Earlier versions of Android allowed reverse potrait. Maybe the developer of flipped mod just wanted to use his phone while charging 😅 @@JanusCycle
@@JanusCycle The inverted, upside-down display and the subtle screen corruption (notice the selected item indicator doesn't line up at 12:36) make me wonder if this was meant to go with some sort of hardware mod (maybe a different LCD?)
Always good to hear from fellow modders. There's something very special about really making a phone your very own. I greatly appreciate your support as I make these videos.
My parents worked at Siemens computer division from late 80's to the early 2000's before it was sold away. I remember this phone, because they brought one home. Also a very early camera phone and one which was a windows mobile 2005 PDA with a phone, GPS and lots of other functionality. And loads of weird computers. My first PC as a kid was an embedded PC with matrox graphics.
Ayyyyy that was the best device ever! Live firmware patching! Java that could initiate calls and send SMS, there was an app for sending long messages that the phone didn't support natively! Java also had filesystem access, which let me read a lot of books on this teeny tiny screen! Some people even used it for playing videos! And the hardware MP3 decoder was nice, although you needed some freaky looking adapter to actually listen to the music using headphones. Once, I spent my food money for a 256MB SD card to avoid converting my MP3s to 64kbps. Thank you for this video :))))))))))))))))))))))
To add some more context - unless you had a special flashing cable, you needed to play around like that. It was easier with a cradle, where you could quickly remove and put the phone back in.
Interesting how the SL4x series of phones modding was so popular in Poland, Ukraine and Russia, I never knew that! Also, at 10:05 - as a Pole myself the text replacement for "Searching for Network" made me chuckle (to put it lightly, it means "searching for p*ssy" lol)
I am glad I subscribed to this channel. This is a high quality content the modern internet needs. Besides, it gives a feel of nostalgia, yet still developing some technical skills that may come handy at some point. Keep on doing it, this is honestly a valuable input.
I love old technology, they feel like an ancient artifact with their own style and character, I didn't grow with them so I think this is why I feel like that toward them.
I remember this software from back in the day - do not know how 13 yo me stumble upon this in school's pc room, but i ordered cable online (pretty nervewracking back then 😀) and patch my Siemens A55 with C55 firmware... so much memories unlocked 😀 thank you for that!
I really loved Siemens phones. I got my dad's C60 when I was 8 in around 2011, I literally cried when they told me I might need a new one because the battery was going bad
I congratulate you for these special contents that have never been made before, I started following you, we are waiting for the continuation of the contents. It is very exciting to install custom ROMs on old phones.🎉
No need to reply to this, I'm just stopping by to give you a like as an old SL45(i) owner. I've said it many times, but I'll repeat it here: I still consider the SL45 to be the coolest phone I've ever had (at the time it was new). And the best-looking phone I've had beside the iPhone 4. So, naturally, it is amazing to see your videos about the model - and everything it can do. I kept mine until 2019, just because I found it hard to throw it away... Thanks for the nostalgia!
12:25 maybe they modded their phone hardware too. Flipping the display module 180° might affect the viewing angle, and rotating the polarizer 90° while inverting the pixels gives nicer contrast on some LCDs.
I watched both your videos about this phone and remembering the animations and some of the java games I used to play as a schoolboy made me cry. Thank you so much for your effort
Love these videos! takes me back during my high school days when we were nerding out with Nokias custom roms and installing some stuff on. Hoping some of these old school modders would see their work here in your channel and expand on it a little bit more! Thank you so much for taking me back memory lane! keep it up!
There have been some comments on some videos from original developers. One that comes to mind the TheAndroid who wrote the SIM emulator in the Motorola video. It's like having royalty visit.
This series is so enjoyable to watch. Like a trip down the nerdiest alternate version of memory lane. I only modded Sony Ericssons, but I was aware that Siemens made some phones too. It's cool to see what they could do.
My dad had Siemens c45. I recall it was his first phone and he been using it in at least 10 years. He works as construction worker. I remember i owned few Siemens phones as well. My favorites was MC60 since it has camera (was my first camera phone i think).I had also a55 and m55. Those were fun and simple times. There was whole ton of manufacurers and unique form factors and software. 😊
As a software engineer, I'm truly impressed by the incredible amount of work that goes into creating the software for these devices. It's fascinating to think about all the coding and problem-solving that must have been involved. I have a deep appreciation for the skill and dedication of those who develop such amazing technology.
When I first started to mod my phone it was the year 2008. I had previously heard of this modding community but I did not have the resources to do it. I have successfully gained some storage for my motorola v220 to upload some mp3 songs, and a yeal later I ended up bricking a motorola rokr e8. Then came custom roms for android and the world would not be the same! I never knew there was a community for siemens phones. Thanks for the video!
Thanks for the flashbacks. I loved making and sharing custom roms for our Windows Mobile Samsung Omnia i910. They only came with WinMo 6.1 but myself and a bunch of others kept the Omnia on life support all the way up to WinMo 6.5 GOOD TIMES!!!!
Man, what a trip down the memory lane, i had a friend that worked at a GSM repair shop and he had some custom ROM Motorola or Nokia phone with Ghost Busters as wallpaper. I hope you will visit the E and N series Nokias sometime more in depth, there were plenty of customizations for Symbian too.
Beauty of custom roms. It reminds me back in 2010-20111 when I had Galaxy S and trying multiple custom roms in one day. Back then where things were much simpler than they are now.
that is so cool, i remember this era of heavy customization of everything from winamp skins to our phones to our GBA SP flash card rom menus, even palm pilot and later PDAs. I also travelled to europe around 2000 as well and remember seeing lots of Dutch and Belgian folks had modded Nokias and Siemens
Good old hacked ROMs, they were cooked all the way up to Windows Mobile's demise. I didn't keep my regular phones long enough to even look for cooked ROMS. Technology was moving so fast back then that since you were on the 2 yr contract you pretty much got a new phone every two years at minimum. I didn't start looking at different ROMs until I got an HTC HD2, I assume you know of that handsets accolades. And yeah I got a couple ROMs for it and they had some nice changes from the original. Also idk if consoles and iPods count but I did those as well (I had to do the PSP the hard way, hard modding my battery)
The HTC HD2 is worth it's own video one day. And every device is worth exploring. I had a PSP back then and I would love to get one again today to re-mod it again.
this brings me back to my teens when i had m55, c65 and s65. s65 was the "final form" before i went windows mobile (ipaq 514 and later 914). custom mods had things like task manager so you could run icq in the background all day. i also had external bluetooth gsm module so sometimes we did geocaching :) vklay was the name of the game back then, i cannot count all the times i bricked my phone but also brought it back to life. i also think jan should be pronounced like yan, sounds like a czech name
Couple years on, I was _pretty deep_ in the Sony Ericsson K310/W220i modding era. I remember hacking my K310 to have the W220i software, and gaining a whooping **COUPLE MEGABYTES** of storage!!!!!! That and the Walkman MP3 player. I loaded it with 10-20 tracks at 64kbps, got a shitty Sony Ericsson to 3.5mm jack cable, and there I was jammin at chiptunes in recess (and also in class heh). I was in... 4th-5th grade? But holy shit it felt so liberating to hack your phone and have it completely transform into something completely different. I haven't modded my phone's in probably 10 years. I've had over 30, swapping them every 6 months by flipping them when I was a kid. Now I just have a boring S22+, bone stock, being the computer I use the most. It's just a boring black slab, tbh.
yea i was alive back then but i didn't see the potential of these things .i just used them to call maybe play snake or texting if i had my current knowledge these things could make high school a lot less boring .a lot of these mods are in polish and Russian i can now understand polish and Russian but when this came out i only knew Dutch and broken English
I was like 2yo back in that era, but if i was older i would have for sure discovered this, as i even now tinker A LOT with both things i should and shouldnt lol. Im using a custom rom pixel 7a rn (graphene) and carry a gpd micro pc 6" linux laptop in my bag anywhere i go, together with a wifi antenna, and small ethernet and serial cable... I literally feel like i lose a bodypart when i dont have it on me. Also im slavic so the majority slavic modding community for these phones of this era wouldnt be a problem.
OMG, the nostalgia.... patching and modding with v_klay, freia etc back in the day with Siemens S45, SL45i, S55 even the SX1.. countless hours. I still have all of them somewhere, even the original Handsfree and the docking station of the sl45.
Very cool, thanks for sharing. I really enjoyed seeing you use the Libretto100 to prog. The phone. I really enjoy my Libretto 100. Sooooooo much software on that little thing
Companies claim that signing code helps with security and while that is minimally true we all know it's a way to force the non-open-source agenda on us. These were the good times.
Fascinating. Just fascinating. I gotta get me more old phones... I want to experience these things, things that were huge before i was born or was but was very very little.
The ending track was phenomenal! For those interested its: Journey to Nostalgia - 17 Northstar. I’d love to know how you found it since the rest of the album is explicit rap music!
I found it in the RUclips music library. Which occasionally has stunning gems like this. Thanks for the origin reference. It's great to know more about this piece.
SL45i is definitely a GOAT when it comes to modding/demos, like it is made for it. While I'm not on Siemens's side as I'm in Nokia team(xD), this is one of the devices I definitely love and would definitely get one to mess around with(and make some stuff for it, looks like a good phone for development). It is an iPod classic of phones, for sure.
I remember all of this. The thing is that phones with the Ukrainian language option were not brought to Ukraine until about 2009, when Nokia discovered a large market of buyers. In the 90s and 2000s, almost no company showed interest in entering the electronics market in Ukraine. The warranty for repairing a phone, for example, depended on the honesty of the retailer's store. Back then, these ROMs were created to install the language, and this was done by local electronics retail chains, they often reflashed the phone for custom themes as a feature or advertising. For example, you bought iPhones reflashed before 2014 because the phones you bought directly from abroad came with a regional lock, and you still had to go to a local electronics repair shop and pay money for unlocking.
Again my memory recall. On the begening of the 2000 I do the same with sl45. I have also software where i was able to replace oryginal graphic of each menu part to my own. Thank you for time travel. Ps that was polish language in menu
Another phone you can look into is benq-siemens ef81. That was the first phone I flashed a custom rom on, and you had to because it came with a buggy firmware. It also had another OS hidden, it was some kind of OS developed by Siemens but they had to abandon it. Very interesting phone.
@@JanusCycle Great, looking forward to watching that video in the future (and there are almost no videos on ef81). Also resource I used back in the day in is a forum thread that is still live on benchmark DOT forum DOT rs. Thread is 150 pages long and used to have all the resources, but I imagine there are a lot dead links now.
Yo dawg, I heard you like inversions so we inverted the inverted screen so you can invert while you invert ;) Real talk though, my best guess for that theme is someone made a homemade film about dimension hopping, and their phone was double backwards in the alternate dimension hahah. But that's pure supposition!
V_Klay... That's a name that I haven't read in years. I used to be a modder (and a forum moderator) at the C65/M65/SL65 era. The amount of stuff you can do with your phone was massive, specially if you patched the phone to run elfs directly. I used to be the only one that could run nes roms with an emulator even before smartphones. Also. Having an SX1. Opened an even broader world, since you can run linux from the internal sd card. Also... Using the internal testpads in the pcb to recover a bricked phone was really good.
@@JanusCycle Personally I loved the x65 era. You can flash the SL65 fw into a C65 and unlock a few options (iirc, the sl65 fw was a bit fast and had video playback options). In the case of the M65, you can flash it with the C70 fw. IIRC, in both cases you need to run a patch with v_klay before flashing. In terms of which one is better for modding. By far the C65 just because at the time was the one with most mods and the most cheap and easy to find. Now in terms of usability and durability. The M65. That thing was built like a tank and can be used as a blunt weapon without any problem (bonus points if you attach it to a lanyard and used it like a flail XD). The entire border of the phone was covered in silicon rubber and a 0.5mm thick metal thing. EDIT: Also. I just checked, and one of the main sources of patches for siemens still runs to this day (siemensmania dot cz).
Oh man, what a nostalgia trip! Not only the first phone with an MP3 player, but also the first with expandable memory, and all that in a beautiful form factor. It took an MMC (MultiMedia Card) card, which was developed by Siemens and Secure Digital (and was extremely similar to the more popular SD card). I used to download MP3s on Limewire and copy them onto my 64mb MMC card (isn't that the most 2000's thing ever? Haha!). I also remember manually keying in the notes for ringtones...I specifically remember doing the theme from The Simpsons and Otherside by Red Hot Chili Peppers. My phone prior to this was the Siemens C25, and following this I got the SX1 (another phone that was ahead of its time!). The phone has about a 600mAH battery for over 200 hours of stand-by time. It also had a voice recorder, WAP browser, ID3 support for MP3s, and it came standard with a dock that connected to your PC and charged it! Thank you for sparking up these old memories!
Awesome, I really enjoy hearing from original owners from back in the day. I'm really pleased you took advantage of file sharing and mp3 playback on this phone. I've since learned there was a Samsung phone that could play mp3s a couple of months before the SL45. But it had no removable memory card and didn't sell many units. So the SL45 still reigns supreme in my book.
please mod sony w705 or nokia n95 please... big fan of all your videos, they somehow calm me , relive those glory days of mobile phones. Love from India.
I remember modding back on psp 2000. Had to physically mod the eprom on a removable battery to enter boot-loader mode and then flash cfw to flash 0. I was fascinated
I had a Siemens A35, it was my first phone, I loved it. After that I had an ME45 which had the same orange screen as this.. Was also my favorite, maybe the Sony Ericssons that era had higher level of customization, the K750 was a beast back then!
Very cool! Makes me wonder if the later phones like a Motorola Razor had a custom rom scene as well. I remember doing this to an old Samsung of mine in lime 2012 and it went from a Samsung UI to an LG one which really confused my friends 😭🤣
Remember getting a new phone every 12 months and it was orders of magnitude better than your old one...I miss those days, my iPhone 15 isn't fundamentally different from my old iPhone 4
Phones back then really did differ from each other by a long way! You get a new phone and you gotta relearn most of the things! Unless it's from the same manufacturer, just a different model like switching from a regular Sony Ericsson to a Walkman model, new capabilities and features mixed in with that you mostly know already.
@@loganmacgyver2625 they are talking about fundamental changes. Every other year the OS was basically brand new. Year to year progress was like: - color displays - IrDA port (now you can send files to people) - phone cameras (taking pictures with your phone?!) - Bluetooth (you can now walk around and talk to yourself with a thing hanging on your ear) - WAP (you can blow your mobile balance on downloading stupid ringtones and Gameloft games!) etc. It was insane break-neck pace.
@@JoCaTen even going from a 2001 Nokia to a 2006 one was quite an intense learning experience for my dad though! It was the "most similar", so I bet he wouldn't have managed at all with a manufacturer switch. My personal favourite was probably Sony Ericsson's version of Symbian though, it had a lot more polish and cool shortcuts than Nokia's S40 (I never used S60 much). I really liked Sony Ericsson's themes especially. One kid at my school (whose dad got Sony laptops and phones yearly from his office, giving his son the prior year's model) had kept every theme he'd ever had from them, across multiple devices, and they all still worked! So I got him to send me a couple over Bluetooth.
I think that phone company was ahead of its time I just couldn't keep up they had so many things going on besides phones appliances and I think even engines for vehicles as well as airplanes
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
Unsigned code, what a time to be alive.
Yeah, I remember the early PSP days. Version 1.00 from the JPN market allowed unsigned code to run, but only in user mode. Which allowed researchers to gain full access later on.
Or unsigned lisence 😂
@@xero110 early PSP and PS3 was soooo good for hacking
@@mimerfb yeah on nokias
@@kaitlyn__L Ps3 modding got me into programming, black ops 1 mod menus in c# were so fun to make
10:04 Yes, it's Polish. Seems that author changed some strings though, because "Network search" is literally replaced with "Looking for p*ssy". Some other labels are also replaced to be "cool": "Zapodaj" in menu is hard to translate, as it's slang term similar to "gimme some".
yeah the best way to describe the translation is just humorous/street polish slang
lmao freaky dev
szuka cipki xD
lol
Thanks for translating.
I see more peoples from Poland here :D:D Pozdrówki
Unbelievable. I love the vibrancy of the eastern European modding scene of that time. I remember glimpsing at one or even two displays of modded phones (in public transportation for example) during my teens in Greece in the early 2000s.
Janus i also adore every aspect of your videos, from the edit to your characteristic monotonic intonation, elaborate wording and lovely outros. It's always a treat.
Modded phones? Would you like to elaborate?
Some Russian/Ukrainian hackers even created a "Vampire Phone" by modding the ROM of a Motorola DPC analog phone which was able to scan the control channels and stole ESN/mobile number pairs on the fly for making free calls. It's was crazy back then. :D
I made a couple of minor mistakes in this one. Such as saying the birds in the tree were cats. Also maybe some others I have not spotted yet. But I wanted to get this out in about a week as promised. And I'm sure there's nothing that breaks the story. I hope you enjoy the deeper look into this amazing phone :)
4 min gang
It doesn't bother me ;) I like it
Janus! I have a Sony Ericsson w995i in really good condition. I recall you saying that you would like to get one... Let me know and I will ship it to you 👍
SL45 was my first mobile phone.
I also seen moded SL45 with blue screen & buttons.
Also check out the phone Motorola E680 it's Linux OS with stylus. That phone had so many soft mods I loved that smart phone in 2004 I remember I flashed the firmware to E680i although Motorola said it can't be done but Internet forums had me covered on that one.
Great video, subscribed!
Some Russian/Ukrainian hackers even created a "Vampire Phone" by modding the ROM of a Motorola DPC analog phone which was able to scan the control channels to steal ESN/mobile number pairs on the fly for making free calls. It's was crazy back then. :D
The flipped screen is obviously meant for the Australian model :P
It's even more of a troll now. I wonder what the original modder would think knowing he got someone downunder with this.
@JanusCycle Android doesn't allow rotating the screen to reverse potrait, sometimes the charging port at the bottom makes it difficult to use the phone while it is charging. Earlier versions of Android allowed reverse potrait. Maybe the developer of flipped mod just wanted to use his phone while charging 😅 @@JanusCycle
@@JanusCycle The inverted, upside-down display and the subtle screen corruption (notice the selected item indicator doesn't line up at 12:36) make me wonder if this was meant to go with some sort of hardware mod (maybe a different LCD?)
@@jacekm833 I also wondered about the glitch, interesting idea, thanks.
@@nuravlearnindeed, my lenovo tab 2 running android 5.1 can rotate like that but the charging port is on the top anyway
Thank you and greetings from modder to modder. :)
Always good to hear from fellow modders. There's something very special about really making a phone your very own. I greatly appreciate your support as I make these videos.
10:02 The phone saying "Szuka cipki" which literally translates to "Searching for pussy"" made me crack up quite a bit. You gotta love 2005 humour :')
My parents worked at Siemens computer division from late 80's to the early 2000's before it was sold away.
I remember this phone, because they brought one home. Also a very early camera phone and one which was a windows mobile 2005 PDA with a phone, GPS and lots of other functionality. And loads of weird computers. My first PC as a kid was an embedded PC with matrox graphics.
Ayyyyy that was the best device ever! Live firmware patching! Java that could initiate calls and send SMS, there was an app for sending long messages that the phone didn't support natively! Java also had filesystem access, which let me read a lot of books on this teeny tiny screen! Some people even used it for playing videos! And the hardware MP3 decoder was nice, although you needed some freaky looking adapter to actually listen to the music using headphones. Once, I spent my food money for a 256MB SD card to avoid converting my MP3s to 64kbps. Thank you for this video :))))))))))))))))))))))
To add some more context - unless you had a special flashing cable, you needed to play around like that. It was easier with a cradle, where you could quickly remove and put the phone back in.
And the best patch was reducing the timeout on the T9 keyboard, so you could enter another letter from the same number key quicker.
8:23 Crazy Frog is such a perfect reminder of that era :D
Crazy Frog Axel F was Sony Ericsson K750 era. This ringtone is the Beverly Hills Cop version of Axel F.
Very active community in Poland was a part of a oldschool phpBb forum. Greetings to all of you who remember.
I remember phpbb forum
In Poland every forum was on phpBBbyPrzemo if I remember well
Interesting how the SL4x series of phones modding was so popular in Poland, Ukraine and Russia, I never knew that!
Also, at 10:05 - as a Pole myself the text replacement for "Searching for Network" made me chuckle (to put it lightly, it means "searching for p*ssy" lol)
Haha)) Really?)) Haha)
Xd starepro user
And at this moment that Janus knew .. He fucked up.
nsfw indeed!
Поиск цыцки
That orange screen is amazing. Maybe better than the green nokia screens!
It's definitely better on the eyes
Yeah, it' s better that green, but IMO blue is better and the best - most premium is white (like the Nokia 8850 etc).
The Nokia 5210 has an orange backlight.
Blue>>>
@@orfeas92white is kinda boring though
I am glad I subscribed to this channel. This is a high quality content the modern internet needs. Besides, it gives a feel of nostalgia, yet still developing some technical skills that may come handy at some point. Keep on doing it, this is honestly a valuable input.
Thanks!
I'm pleased you enjoyed this and thank you for giving some extra support. I promise I'll always do my best at making great videos.
I love old technology, they feel like an ancient artifact with their own style and character, I didn't grow with them so I think this is why I feel like that toward them.
I remember this software from back in the day - do not know how 13 yo me stumble upon this in school's pc room, but i ordered cable online (pretty nervewracking back then 😀) and patch my Siemens A55 with C55 firmware... so much memories unlocked 😀 thank you for that!
NAHHH THE POLISH ROM IS FREAKY
We had a lot of mods and cfw, I think I had HDD with it.
5
"Network search" have been replaced with "search for pussy" 😂😂
I really loved Siemens phones. I got my dad's C60 when I was 8 in around 2011, I literally cried when they told me I might need a new one because the battery was going bad
Grazie.
Really great of you, thanks for your support!
Unparagoned music selection. I have never heard a single song you've included before, and each one takes me on an existential journey.
I congratulate you for these special contents that have never been made before, I started following you, we are waiting for the continuation of the contents.
It is very exciting to install custom ROMs on old phones.🎉
Thank you, this was so much fun to explore the firmware of this phone.
No need to reply to this, I'm just stopping by to give you a like as an old SL45(i) owner. I've said it many times, but I'll repeat it here: I still consider the SL45 to be the coolest phone I've ever had (at the time it was new). And the best-looking phone I've had beside the iPhone 4. So, naturally, it is amazing to see your videos about the model - and everything it can do. I kept mine until 2019, just because I found it hard to throw it away... Thanks for the nostalgia!
...and now I'm a new subscriber, looking forward to more nostalgia from those amazing times...
It's always a pleasure for me to hear from the original owners of these devices from the time. I just had to reply and let you know this.
I also owned a SL45i, and from my mobile phones of that era, it was awesome. My second favorite for sure (the favorite was the Sony Ericsson z550i).
12:25 maybe they modded their phone hardware too. Flipping the display module 180° might affect the viewing angle, and rotating the polarizer 90° while inverting the pixels gives nicer contrast on some LCDs.
I watched both your videos about this phone and remembering the animations and some of the java games I used to play as a schoolboy made me cry. Thank you so much for your effort
Thank you for continuing to upload videos!! This is one of my favorite channels. Always a joy to see in my feed
I always envied those who had Nokia phones running custom ROMs at the time. Wish the cables used for these old devices could be easily obtained tho.
Love these videos! takes me back during my high school days when we were nerding out with Nokias custom roms and installing some stuff on. Hoping some of these old school modders would see their work here in your channel and expand on it a little bit more! Thank you so much for taking me back memory lane! keep it up!
There have been some comments on some videos from original developers. One that comes to mind the TheAndroid who wrote the SIM emulator in the Motorola video. It's like having royalty visit.
This is such a cool forgotten era this stuff is awesome!
I MISS THIS ERA OF PHONES. SO MUCH VARIETY AND SPACE TO EXPLORE
holy shit, you made me remember a game that I was trying to find for decades now, thank you so much
Your videos are so detailed and well edited excellent work
Thank you :)
This series is so enjoyable to watch. Like a trip down the nerdiest alternate version of memory lane. I only modded Sony Ericssons, but I was aware that Siemens made some phones too. It's cool to see what they could do.
My dad had Siemens c45. I recall it was his first phone and he been using it in at least 10 years. He works as construction worker. I remember i owned few Siemens phones as well. My favorites was MC60 since it has camera (was my first camera phone i think).I had also a55 and m55. Those were fun and simple times. There was whole ton of manufacurers and unique form factors and software. 😊
The Matrix : The red pill ❤
John wick : The blue pill 💙
Siemens SL 45 : The orange pill 🧡
nah thats the Gordon Freeman pill
Haha🤣
I had the SL 45 when it came out. What a great device.
As a software engineer, I'm truly impressed by the incredible amount of work that goes into creating the software for these devices. It's fascinating to think about all the coding and problem-solving that must have been involved. I have a deep appreciation for the skill and dedication of those who develop such amazing technology.
I love your videos, comment and topics. Please continue, excellent work!
I'm very pleased you are enjoying this channel. I am working on some new videos, hopefully soon to be done.
This is actually entertaining to watch, love your channel!
awesome, thanks!
Another great video. Thanks for your great work.
i would honestly use a phone menu like that tree with all the cute little animals today, what a fascinating and cool menu design
I love how much of a deep dive you have done into this random phone.
If the depth is there, I'm going all the way down :)
Such a cool video to describe rom’s scene in the early days! Thanks Janus!
This was so much fun to explore. I'm glad you enjoyed this.
When I first started to mod my phone it was the year 2008. I had previously heard of this modding community but I did not have the resources to do it. I have successfully gained some storage for my motorola v220 to upload some mp3 songs, and a yeal later I ended up bricking a motorola rokr e8. Then came custom roms for android and the world would not be the same! I never knew there was a community for siemens phones. Thanks for the video!
Thank you too! It's really enjoyable to watch your experiments :)
Thanks for the flashbacks. I loved making and sharing custom roms for our Windows Mobile Samsung Omnia i910. They only came with WinMo 6.1 but myself and a bunch of others kept the Omnia on life support all the way up to WinMo 6.5 GOOD TIMES!!!!
Man, what a trip down the memory lane, i had a friend that worked at a GSM repair shop and he had some custom ROM Motorola or Nokia phone with Ghost Busters as wallpaper. I hope you will visit the E and N series Nokias sometime more in depth, there were plenty of customizations for Symbian too.
Another Janus video makes any day great.
"Szuka cipki" xD
kiedyś to była zabawa hehehe
Ciekawe czy już się zorientował :D
@@thirtyseconds2Jeśli to zobaczy, to przynajmniej będzie się śmiał ze swoich (lub czyichś) wpadek.
These things happen sometimes.
smiesznie by bylo jakbym sflashowala taki firmware i potem tak sprzedala ten telefon xdxd
Thank you for the video!
I had a Nokia 3310 with a custom rom, 20 years ago!
It could unlock other phones, had many games, and so on.
Uber cool. Really enjoyed all the custom ROMs for this phone.
Beauty of custom roms. It reminds me back in 2010-20111 when I had Galaxy S and trying multiple custom roms in one day.
Back then where things were much simpler than they are now.
Original Galaxy S, nice. An early OLED screen phone and had TV out from the headphone socket :)
Really fun video to watch, thanks!
keep the stunning work
that is so cool, i remember this era of heavy customization of everything from winamp skins to our phones to our GBA SP flash card rom menus, even palm pilot and later PDAs. I also travelled to europe around 2000 as well and remember seeing lots of Dutch and Belgian folks had modded Nokias and Siemens
Good old hacked ROMs, they were cooked all the way up to Windows Mobile's demise. I didn't keep my regular phones long enough to even look for cooked ROMS. Technology was moving so fast back then that since you were on the 2 yr contract you pretty much got a new phone every two years at minimum. I didn't start looking at different ROMs until I got an HTC HD2, I assume you know of that handsets accolades. And yeah I got a couple ROMs for it and they had some nice changes from the original.
Also idk if consoles and iPods count but I did those as well (I had to do the PSP the hard way, hard modding my battery)
The HTC HD2 is worth it's own video one day. And every device is worth exploring. I had a PSP back then and I would love to get one again today to re-mod it again.
this brings me back to my teens when i had m55, c65 and s65. s65 was the "final form" before i went windows mobile (ipaq 514 and later 914). custom mods had things like task manager so you could run icq in the background all day. i also had external bluetooth gsm module so sometimes we did geocaching :) vklay was the name of the game back then, i cannot count all the times i bricked my phone but also brought it back to life. i also think jan should be pronounced like yan, sounds like a czech name
really love videos like this
would be nice to see your video about a little newer siemens sx1, it also had a large modding scene. good old times :) cool video!
I am looking for more Siemens models with colour LCDs for future videos.
amazing to see that even back in the day people wanted the most out of their phones.
Couple years on, I was _pretty deep_ in the Sony Ericsson K310/W220i modding era. I remember hacking my K310 to have the W220i software, and gaining a whooping **COUPLE MEGABYTES** of storage!!!!!! That and the Walkman MP3 player.
I loaded it with 10-20 tracks at 64kbps, got a shitty Sony Ericsson to 3.5mm jack cable, and there I was jammin at chiptunes in recess (and also in class heh). I was in... 4th-5th grade? But holy shit it felt so liberating to hack your phone and have it completely transform into something completely different.
I haven't modded my phone's in probably 10 years. I've had over 30, swapping them every 6 months by flipping them when I was a kid. Now I just have a boring S22+, bone stock, being the computer I use the most. It's just a boring black slab, tbh.
SE modding scene was the peak of phone modding.
Now we got people like me modding our modern phones and putting CFW just so we cant be spied on
Gotta love the late 90s and early 2000s modding scene!
I'm sad that I didn't get to experience these things tbh
Same my man, same...
yea i was alive back then but i didn't see the potential of these things .i just used them to call maybe play snake or texting if i had my current knowledge these things could make high school a lot less boring .a lot of these mods are in polish and Russian i can now understand polish and Russian but when this came out i only knew Dutch and broken English
I was like 2yo back in that era, but if i was older i would have for sure discovered this, as i even now tinker A LOT with both things i should and shouldnt lol. Im using a custom rom pixel 7a rn (graphene) and carry a gpd micro pc 6" linux laptop in my bag anywhere i go, together with a wifi antenna, and small ethernet and serial cable... I literally feel like i lose a bodypart when i dont have it on me.
Also im slavic so the majority slavic modding community for these phones of this era wouldnt be a problem.
Nice video. SL45i my dream phone for today😅
Yaay another janus video
I enjoy them because they are a history lesson.
Love you style too..... calm and relaxed.
cool, thanks.
I love these videos. Although I am not that old to have seen or used these devices but I wish I could.
OMG, the nostalgia.... patching and modding with v_klay, freia etc back in the day with Siemens S45, SL45i, S55 even the SX1.. countless hours.
I still have all of them somewhere, even the original Handsfree and the docking station of the sl45.
I'm glad you keep your older phones. Which colour screen Siemens do you think was best for firmware modding?
Very cool, thanks for sharing. I really enjoyed seeing you use the Libretto100 to prog. The phone. I really enjoy my Libretto 100. Sooooooo much software on that little thing
It's an awesome little machine.
Companies claim that signing code helps with security and while that is minimally true we all know it's a way to force the non-open-source agenda on us. These were the good times.
Fascinating.
Just fascinating.
I gotta get me more old phones...
I want to experience these things, things that were huge before i was born or was but was very very little.
The ending track was phenomenal! For those interested its: Journey to Nostalgia - 17 Northstar. I’d love to know how you found it since the rest of the album is explicit rap music!
I found it in the RUclips music library. Which occasionally has stunning gems like this. Thanks for the origin reference. It's great to know more about this piece.
@@JanusCycle definitely a hidden gem! Glad you included it!
this is truly amazing
10:08 language is polish, but the text on the homescreen made me chuckle
SL45i is definitely a GOAT when it comes to modding/demos, like it is made for it. While I'm not on Siemens's side as I'm in Nokia team(xD), this is one of the devices I definitely love and would definitely get one to mess around with(and make some stuff for it, looks like a good phone for development). It is an iPod classic of phones, for sure.
I hope we’ll see Doom on every device…
I remember all of this. The thing is that phones with the Ukrainian language option were not brought to Ukraine until about 2009, when Nokia discovered a large market of buyers. In the 90s and 2000s, almost no company showed interest in entering the electronics market in Ukraine. The warranty for repairing a phone, for example, depended on the honesty of the retailer's store. Back then, these ROMs were created to install the language, and this was done by local electronics retail chains, they often reflashed the phone for custom themes as a feature or advertising. For example, you bought iPhones reflashed before 2014 because the phones you bought directly from abroad came with a regional lock, and you still had to go to a local electronics repair shop and pay money for unlocking.
Again my memory recall. On the begening of the 2000 I do the same with sl45. I have also software where i was able to replace oryginal graphic of each menu part to my own. Thank you for time travel. Ps that was polish language in menu
Reminds me (again) of my Nokia S40 modding years with my super thin, sleek Nokia 7210 Supernova-though yeaaa it was way later than this Siemens😂
inverted screens: some models in russia had LCD module that inverted coordinates and brightens. thus it needed a separate firmware config
it's called PenG Lexer - Never Gonna Give You Up (Lofi Remix version)
This is awesome. I started into modding on the PPC (pocket PC).
We all somehow got to experience the custom Roms, my first one was back in 2013, I had no idea it went soo way back! I was a toddler by that time 😂😂
Really chill videos
cool
I've had sl45i when i was in middle school, ace video, java, mp3 and patching. good times!
Another phone you can look into is benq-siemens ef81. That was the first phone I flashed a custom rom on, and you had to because it came with a buggy firmware. It also had another OS hidden, it was some kind of OS developed by Siemens but they had to abandon it. Very interesting phone.
That does sound interesting, thanks!
@@JanusCycle Great, looking forward to watching that video in the future (and there are almost no videos on ef81).
Also resource I used back in the day in is a forum thread that is still live on benchmark DOT forum DOT rs.
Thread is 150 pages long and used to have all the resources, but I imagine there are a lot dead links now.
Yo dawg, I heard you like inversions so we inverted the inverted screen so you can invert while you invert ;)
Real talk though, my best guess for that theme is someone made a homemade film about dimension hopping, and their phone was double backwards in the alternate dimension hahah. But that's pure supposition!
V_Klay... That's a name that I haven't read in years.
I used to be a modder (and a forum moderator) at the C65/M65/SL65 era. The amount of stuff you can do with your phone was massive, specially if you patched the phone to run elfs directly. I used to be the only one that could run nes roms with an emulator even before smartphones.
Also. Having an SX1. Opened an even broader world, since you can run linux from the internal sd card.
Also... Using the internal testpads in the pcb to recover a bricked phone was really good.
Great to hear from someone in the scene at the time. Which were the best colour screen Siemens models for modding?
@@JanusCycle Personally I loved the x65 era. You can flash the SL65 fw into a C65 and unlock a few options (iirc, the sl65 fw was a bit fast and had video playback options). In the case of the M65, you can flash it with the C70 fw. IIRC, in both cases you need to run a patch with v_klay before flashing.
In terms of which one is better for modding. By far the C65 just because at the time was the one with most mods and the most cheap and easy to find. Now in terms of usability and durability. The M65. That thing was built like a tank and can be used as a blunt weapon without any problem (bonus points if you attach it to a lanyard and used it like a flail XD). The entire border of the phone was covered in silicon rubber and a 0.5mm thick metal thing.
EDIT: Also. I just checked, and one of the main sources of patches for siemens still runs to this day (siemensmania dot cz).
Oh man, what a nostalgia trip! Not only the first phone with an MP3 player, but also the first with expandable memory, and all that in a beautiful form factor. It took an MMC (MultiMedia Card) card, which was developed by Siemens and Secure Digital (and was extremely similar to the more popular SD card). I used to download MP3s on Limewire and copy them onto my 64mb MMC card (isn't that the most 2000's thing ever? Haha!). I also remember manually keying in the notes for ringtones...I specifically remember doing the theme from The Simpsons and Otherside by Red Hot Chili Peppers. My phone prior to this was the Siemens C25, and following this I got the SX1 (another phone that was ahead of its time!).
The phone has about a 600mAH battery for over 200 hours of stand-by time. It also had a voice recorder, WAP browser, ID3 support for MP3s, and it came standard with a dock that connected to your PC and charged it!
Thank you for sparking up these old memories!
Awesome, I really enjoy hearing from original owners from back in the day. I'm really pleased you took advantage of file sharing and mp3 playback on this phone.
I've since learned there was a Samsung phone that could play mp3s a couple of months before the SL45. But it had no removable memory card and didn't sell many units. So the SL45 still reigns supreme in my book.
Aaah nostalgic, modding Siemens A55 to C55, modded to play true tone compare with other polyphonic phone
please mod sony w705 or nokia n95 please... big fan of all your videos, they somehow calm me , relive those glory days of mobile phones. Love from India.
I remember modding back on psp 2000. Had to physically mod the eprom on a removable battery to enter boot-loader mode and then flash cfw to flash 0. I was fascinated
PSP was excellent for modding. I wish I still had my PSP.
I had a Siemens A35, it was my first phone, I loved it. After that I had an ME45 which had the same orange screen as this.. Was also my favorite, maybe the Sony Ericssons that era had higher level of customization, the K750 was a beast back then!
K750 was the greatest. And the ME45 is also good.
the end is epic😮
I'm pleased you enjoyed this :)
Very cool! Makes me wonder if the later phones like a Motorola Razor had a custom rom scene as well. I remember doing this to an old Samsung of mine in lime 2012 and it went from a Samsung UI to an LG one which really confused my friends 😭🤣
Some Motorola V3 models have some really good firmware patching abilities. I'm looking for a V3i to try this.
E398 was “the” modding phone but the other ones on the same platform also got plenty of stuff
So the E398 had the most mods of any Motorola?
Remember getting a new phone every 12 months and it was orders of magnitude better than your old one...I miss those days, my iPhone 15 isn't fundamentally different from my old iPhone 4
Phones back then really did differ from each other by a long way!
You get a new phone and you gotta relearn most of the things!
Unless it's from the same manufacturer, just a different model like switching from a regular Sony Ericsson to a Walkman model, new capabilities and features mixed in with that you mostly know already.
I went from a redmi note 9 to a note 11 pro 5G. Only difference I noticed is if I'm in certain areas of the capital city I get better speeds sometimes
@@loganmacgyver2625 they are talking about fundamental changes. Every other year the OS was basically brand new. Year to year progress was like:
- color displays
- IrDA port (now you can send files to people)
- phone cameras (taking pictures with your phone?!)
- Bluetooth (you can now walk around and talk to yourself with a thing hanging on your ear)
- WAP (you can blow your mobile balance on downloading stupid ringtones and Gameloft games!)
etc.
It was insane break-neck pace.
iPhones haven't changed since iPhone 11 or 12
@@JoCaTen even going from a 2001 Nokia to a 2006 one was quite an intense learning experience for my dad though! It was the "most similar", so I bet he wouldn't have managed at all with a manufacturer switch.
My personal favourite was probably Sony Ericsson's version of Symbian though, it had a lot more polish and cool shortcuts than Nokia's S40 (I never used S60 much).
I really liked Sony Ericsson's themes especially. One kid at my school (whose dad got Sony laptops and phones yearly from his office, giving his son the prior year's model) had kept every theme he'd ever had from them, across multiple devices, and they all still worked! So I got him to send me a couple over Bluetooth.
Honey, wake up janus just dropped
Great video, I think I have a phone like that somewhere in the basement (I have to dig out my box of old phones and make a video about it). 🙂
Awesome, this is a really fun phone to have.
I think that phone company was ahead of its time I just couldn't keep up they had so many things going on besides phones appliances and I think even engines for vehicles as well as airplanes
babe wake up, Janus Cycle posted a new video