Gotta love the older technology

While I was away on vacation, a buddy of mine went to a flea market and bought a load of old cell phones for me. 3 of them (not pictured) are the old Motorola Bricks. One is a Startac which has an LED screen, I believe LCD technology was too expensive at the time. I've taken a couple of the somewhat 'newer' models apart to compare pm content to even newer models.

The two Nokias on the left of the first two pics are pretty nice. They both come with 2 boards in each phone and the boards are nicely plated. The 3rd Nokia 3590 only has a single board but the board is very nicely plated. Notice the size of the keypad contacts and the wide plating on the back of the 3590 board. I believe these 'Candybar' type phones were prevalent during the late 90's to early 2000's.









The third and fourth pictures show older 'Brick' style phones with single boards but both are still nicely plated. For size comparison, a newer Nokia Flip style phone was included at the bottom of the pics. The flip style boards have small amounts of plating for the keypad contacts and very little to none on the reverse side of the boards. The problem with the 'Brick' style phones is they came with the unreliable Ni-MH and Ni-CAD batteries. I'm wondering if anyone here on SMF knows someone or someplace that takes these types of batteries free of charge....












Look at the size difference between the older Nokia 3590 keypad contacts and the newer 'Flip-Phone' board. There's no comparison.









The flip phones held the market from the early
2000's to about late 2006 , I believe, when the QWERTY slide out keyboard style started making an appearance. Now the market is dominantly touchscreen style phones like your Androids, HTC's and IPhones. I haven't taken any of the touch screen style phones apart yet but if the boards are of any similarity to GPS boards, that'll be a disappointment. If, after comparing the late 90's models to the mid 2000 models is any indication, I'd imagine that the newest technology will have the least amount of Gold Plating. Good places I've gone to find older cell phones are flea markets, yard and estate sales, sometimes even Goodwill. I usually don't pay more than .50 cents per phone and alot of times get chargers thrown in. In my opinion, older cell phone boards should be graded higher than even motherboards and telecom because think about it, some telecom boards can weigh near 2 or more pounds a piece with not nearly as much gold plating where as it takes anywhere from 12-15 of these nicely plated cell phone boards to make the same weight. Just my thoughts.

is that gold traces going all around the boards ?

Originally Posted by Bear

is that gold traces going all around the boards ?

Yes those traces are all plated. Most cell phones pre-2002, or so, seem to have nice large boards with gold plated tracing all over the board along with huge keypad contacts compared to the newer counterparts.

The thing I like about cell phones....I don't need a truck to haul 300 of them from the auction site where as 300 desktops......

well, at least with old desktops the shells are mostly metal ; ) What do you do with the chargers? aren't they basically identical to old printer power adapters and such?

Cut the cord off for the insulated wire pile, break open the plastic cover and take out the transformer for the motor pile only if the chargers are from old phones that are no longer desirable. Wall adapters that are still usable, I'll try to sell at the local flea market for 50 cents apiece. Car adapters sell pretty easily at the flea market. Wall adapters, not so much.