On being realistic

You can’t surround yourself with illusions all the time. Someday, you have to face reality. And do you know what the current reality is? You can find Nokia 216 in every store, you can find Nokia 1 in most stores, but you can find Nokia 8110 4G absolutely nowhere.

As I already said, I’m not a whiner type but since I started this blog I want to write the information that can be not only shared and spread out, but also practically used. And we can’t deny the fact that while Chinese MTK-based OEMs are different for every country, MTK-based Nokias are pretty much the same across the world. This is the advantage I’m going to leverage to the full extent.

After HMD’s MWC-2019 exhibition, I know that the course taken by me is right. I’m not going to stop GerdaOS development. However, just for this blog, I’m going to run a new cycle dedicated to Nokia 1 family. Rooting, IMEI modification, tinkering with radiomodules, removing spying elements, all of it. My goal is to create a complete phreaker’s guide dedicated to these models, since they are harder to manipulate than your average MT67xx OEM smartphone.

JFYI, I already have a “standard” Nokia 1 (TA-1047 model). I consider it the best pre-$100 smartphone of 2018. There are several reasons for that: removable battery (which gives you absolute superiority over tracking agencies in privacy-critical moments), very sturdy casing and interchangeable panels, MediaTek chipset (meaning simpler NVRAM access), and - last but not least - pure Android Go Edition. Of course, that means it’s harder to break into, but that’s the whole point - I’d rather prefer that only I could do that and that only I would be in a complete control of breaking into it. And low price tag means that you can buy several of them for the price of any noob-oriented touchphone and not have to worry about anything happening to them after your experiments.

So, I’m going to start the cycle from the next day and describe everything I’m trying to do with Nokia 1. Of course, once I get my hands on to Nokia 1 Plus announced and shown on MWC-2019, I’ll continue with it. Their internal differences are subtle: while Nokia 1 has MT6737M (underclocked MT6737 version) and Android 8.1 Go Edition, Nokia 1 Plus is said to have MT6739WW (overclocked MT6739 version) and Android 9.0 Go Edition. But these differences might be enough to see Nokia 1 Plus as a completely different entity in terms of hacking.

When I consider the work done, I’ll release the compilation of my posts as a two-part book, the first one being about the original Nokia 1 and the second one being about Nokia 1 Plus. You can follow the whole story by the hashtag #hacktheone, because the whole book title is planned to be “Hack the One to be the One”.

The shirt I’m wearing right now has a wonderful saying on its left sleeve:

The future belongs to the few of us still willing to get our hands dirty

And this is why we have a wonderful time ahead of us. Just don’t give up.