EEVblog #243 - Vintage Brick Mobile Phone Teardown

What's inside an almost 20 year old analog mobile phone?
Dave tears down a 1993/1994 vintage Motorola Ultra Sleek 9660 "Dynatac" phone and compares it with a Nokia 3310 from 2000

[Pizatto]

Dave, in Brazil in 1996 we had the StarTac Elite series, still analog system. It was much more lighter.

The first cell phone we had in home was in 1991, a TechnoPhone. It was about 2cm thick and had 2x10 alphanumeric LCD.

[MattExzy]

Heh... I remember tuning into analog mobile phone conversations on my VCR, wading through the static. Good times.

[leeharvey]

Ahh the days when you could hear phone conversations on a scanner lol.

[fouzaialaa]

i love the instruction they even tell you to lift the phone to your ear also to lock press lock !!

[mikeselectricstuff]

The biggest, and most aazing part in the old analogue phones was the diplexing filter, which did an amazing job of allowing a receiver to work at minus ninety-something dBm sensitivity while the transmitter was simultaneously pumping about half a watt at (from memory) only 40Mhz away into the same antenna. True black magic.

[MikeStavola]

I lived right near an analog cell phone antenna in the 90s. I tuned my old trinitron to somewhere around channel 82-83 and could listen to one side of the conversations for short periods of time. I heard an illegal trade "I got the goods, you got the money? yeah? I'm leaving it in the trashcans." and phone sex. LOTS of phone sex. But mostly just business and household calls. it was primarily boring.

[MiniButMany]

When people look at these phones they say "Wow look at that massive antenna!" But antenna technology hasn't changed a bit, the only reason you don't need one is that now they have repeaters on every block. Now they just use the not even close to resonant outer case.

[johnfranks]

Motorola V3620 was the smallest Motorola analog phone I can think of. Still small even by today's standards.

The brick format stuck around for a long time after phones started getting smaller. The main reason was power. Cell site placement was much more sparse back then, especially outside of urban areas. a 3 watt phone was necessary to complete calls for those who needed service on the edge of cell site coverage.
-jc

[kanpaifighto]

this is too cool, I looove old telecom stuff. Crazy how far we've come.

[jericotyler]

I remember when I was a kid in the 90's I actually picked up a conversation on my toy walkie talkie. Only happened once though.

[arcadeuk]

Also the terminals underneath the battery that you were looking at are in fact the diagnostics port. There are 2 pins that you can short out on that to put the phone in "Engineer mode" When in that mode you used to be able to scan though the channels on your local cell and listen into ANY call being made through that cell. I can't believe it was so easy to do that back then. With some of the other phones of the time you needed to change the EPROM for engineer mode

[picobyte]

Did anyone notice the smiley in the Nokia phone at 21:43  :)

[Afrotechmods]

Great idea for a teardown! The 7segs cracked me up.

[MarcAndreFerland]

In the 90s cellphones where designed the same way cordless phones where, they reuse pretty much the same parts, shape and logic, only the RF part was really different.

[dhpbear]

18:20 - If today's phones had speakers like this one, they'd probably sound better!

[MrROTD]

My friend John worked for Motorola around that time but he was in the Processor business.

[kevincaughlin]

I worked for Moto during that period and I did build similar phones in the big factory in Liberty Ville Illinois. Ask me any thing about this phone. Burned fingers from that coax wire. Google just announced that they are selling the massive building that we used to build these phones.

[JosefdeJoanelli]

I love the smiley face on the LCD frame of the Nokia.

[steveger]

IMHO mobiles have become to big again. What good is a huge screen if the thing does not fit in my pocket? Also, the ridiculousness of people holding a tablet to their head to make a phone call.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Analogue phones got down to about the size of that Nokia 3310 before analogue died. Motorola was always behind the competition on size and weight as they sold on robustness. Even when much smaller ones were available, these bigger Motorolas were popular with people like builders as they were pretty indestructible. The earlier generation (8500?) Motorolas were amazing inside - lots of ceramic hybrids and metal-ceramic packages!