Just got a bunch of prototype dell smartphones in the mail! There are 99 of these phones, along with one plastic dummy. It looks like they are a mix of Dell Mini 3ix / Blaze phones and Dell Aero (internal name Benzina). Just looking at the outside, there are minor differences. Some have better cameras than others. The sim card clip is slightly different. A few have a weird touch sensitive volume control and few have abs plastic backs instead of the shiny final plastic. Note the different opening mechanisms. The one on the left opens from the top, while the right opens from the bottom. 5MP vs 3MP camera Every phone has a different prototype build code. I placed the white sticker (which most phones have) over the IMEI number and barcode. Please excuse the paint on my hands! About 1/4 of the phones had this clear plastic face. Unfortunately, there wasn't a single battery included in the lot. I'm currently waiting on one to get here from china. Once I have that, I'm going to boot each one up and see if there are any other hardware differences obvious from the settings menus.
Dang, that's a pretty nice lot there. See if you can find any software differences in them. That's something that always makes things more fun!
Thats super neat. It would be pretty interesting (and also VERY time consuming) if you went and cataloged them all with their differences to the actual released phones.
Check the first two digits of the IMEI - if the phone is pre-hardware type approval then they will be "00", otherwise they will be set to a value that indicates who issued the approval. If they are "00" and you can't get the phone to connect, then try a different SIM (I.E. one that works on a different carrier) - some mobile carriers block all test IMEIs except the ones they have specifically whitelisted.
The battery arrived yesterday. Darn thing cost me $15, which is absurd. The battery has plastic tabs on the top to lock it in. Most of the phones had smaller slots, meaning I had to scrape off the tabs before they would fit. Once the tabs were gone, the phones booted fine. I wonder if it was a preproduction thing? Anyway, the phones are a very strange mix. Some are running OPhone software, which is a chinese android derivative. Some are running what looks to be a heavily modified version of android. One was running an unmodified version of some ancient android version, but either the touchscreen was broken or not implemented in software. I have only tested 20 or so of the phones. Thinking of starting some free blog so I can post pictures without suffering through this site's image upload function.
Okay. I started a blog! http://www.protophone.wordpress.com Going to try to post a phone every day or so. I don't want to get bored. Thoughts on the post? Too wordy? Not wordy enough? Did I miss something? Pictures of the internals are going up later today. That might be more interesting. Sorry about the ads, but it's the best I can do on a free site. You should be using adblock anyway.
Added a picture of the insides to the blog. (This is going to be the last time I post here about blog updates.) I'll try to make it the blog little more interesting. The summer heat has robbed me of my enthusiasm. If I find anything really cool, I'll post it here, too!
Paid $2.18 cents per phone shipped. Unless you're interested in buy one, in which case I "can't tell you exactly what I paid, but have to charge $15 per phone just to break even."
Not mine, but here's one. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nokia-Micro...930861?hash=item281db2862d:g:RK8AAOSwdzVXpilr
