This might look like your normal old school, brick style, cellphone, but you're wrong.
It's a full-fledged texting machine with a massive expandable full sized keyboard...released
in 2004.
The Nokia 6800 was the first cellphone I ever owned and I loved it.
I think we should open it up and see what it looks like from the inside.
Let's get started.
[Intro]
Back when I was in high school, cellphones were just starting to get popular.
Even at 16, most of my friends didn't have one yet since they were pretty expensive.
One of my first purchases after getting a job delivering pizzas was buying this cellphone
and a monthly cellphone plan.
Text messages weren't unlimited back then like they are now.
I had 300 text messages to send throughout the month and I would keep track of them to
make sure I wasn't sending more than 30 a day.
Those things were special.
With a keyboard like this though, how could you not constantly be texting?
It's even back-lit This phone was ahead of it's time for sure.
The Nokia 6800 had all the latest and greatest features: messaging, a 10 number call history,
a note taking app.
It even had games – 2 of them.
Bounce was a good one.
The 1.7 inch CSTN display was a passive LCD matrix instead of a more modern, active LCD
matrix.
So there was considerable ghosting and a slow response time.
Not quite as good as the ROG or Razer Phone 2.
It does have a calculator though.
The full size keyboard is the main selling point.
Flipping the phone in half allowed me to bypass the normal T9 texting of my inferior peers
and get both thumbs rocking at full speed, while I enjoyed each of my 300 text messages
every month.
Definitely got all the ladies with this one.
Mohs scale of hardness wasn't one of my main concerns at the time.
Although a little scratch on my 2004 flagship probably would have bothered me quite a bit.
I did get over that fear eventually.
The screen is made from plastic, meaning that it can get scratched by basically anything
in your pocket.
In fact, the whole thing is made from plastic, just like every other phone back then.
It never crossed my mind to take my phone apart.
Back in 2004, YouTube wasn't a thing back then.
But it is now, so here we are.
The information under the battery acts like a warranty void sticker, yet doesn't hide
any screws.
The Nokia 6800 has just 2 T6 screws down at the bottom, and then the two halves can just
unclasp, using my plastic pry tool along the sides.
Then the whole phone can come apart, revealing some pretty sweet stuff.
The keypad is pretty typical of older phones – just a plastic sheet resting on top of
each individual button.
This phone just has a full keypad worth of those buttons.
The frame itself is pretty interesting.
The flip portion is connected with a springy hinge, which I'll show more of in just a second.
The flat portion has little gold contact pads that transfer information from whatever position
the keyboard flap is in.
The gold just rests up against the motherboard inside the phone, just like we see loudspeakers
doing in modern phones nowadays.
Thumbs up for that.
There are 5 additional screws holding the motherboard into the frame of the phone.
Then the whole thing including the screen can pull out, exposing the old school heat
shield, Faraday cage looking things on the back of the motherboard.
The same kind of thing we found inside the indestructible Nokia 3310.
The phone does still work when the battery's held in place.
Look at these LED lights on the keypad.
It's not actually a back-lit keypad, just well placed singular LED lights that are supposed
to light up the whole thing.
Might be why it was a big dimmer than we're used to nowadays.
Down here at the bottom, below the clear plastic LED keypad light redirector, we get the proprietary
headphone jack.
Yep, this long golden contact pad looking thing was the headphone jack.
The circular 3.5 hole was actually for the phone charger.
Times were different.
The micro USB standard wasn't introduced until 2007, and the USB-C standard we use nowadays
was more 2014.
A universal charging method is a very good thing.
The vibrator motor is also down here, supported in the white rubber sheath.
It spins the eccentric rotating mass around really fast to produce the vibrating effect.
I used this phone for about 2 years before switching over to my first camera phone: the
Sony Ericsson K608i.
And then finally getting my first smartphone, a Blackberry Pearl, in 2009.
I'll slap the two halves of the phone back together, making sure I didn't install the
keyboard flap completely backwards, because that would be super embarrassing.
While I'm back in here again though, check out the spring hinge.
As the keyboard flips up to rest against the top of the phone, the springs allow the hinge
to flex up and then pulls the whole flap tight again back against the phone body with the
4 springs in each of these little squares.
Pretty smart.
Anyway, the phone is back together again.
Pretty easy teardown.
It was nice back when things weren't always glued shut, and everything had removable batteries
with easy access screws and could be taken apart in minutes instead of hours.
What was your first phone, and how old were you when you got it?
I'm curious.
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Thanks a ton for watching, and I'll see you around.