Such a great read. I've always loved the design of the Sidekick.

Would it ever be possible to load a version of Android onto one of these phones with enough effort? I suspect the hardware would make it difficult.

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duskwuff 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Would it ever be possible to load a version of Android onto one of these phones with enough effort?

Almost certainly not, and if you did it'd be practically unusable. The highest-end Sidekick devices had 128 MB of RAM; the first Android phones, like the HTC Dream, had 192 MB or more. It'd also have no network connectivity, as the Sidekick was a 2G / 3G device and didn't support 802.11 wireless.

	▲	toast0 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There was an Android build for OpenMoko Neo 1973 and it only had 128 MB ram (it also was missing some cpu extension and had to use kernel emulation for that, which wasn't a good experience... but nothing about that phone was a good experience, which is why I don't preorder hardware anymore)
	▲	kotaKat 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> practically unusable Hey, as one of the people that flashed Android onto one of my old HTC Windows Mobile phones and tried to daily it, I resent that! (We used to make it work in the 1.6-2.x era...)

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microcode 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks! Probably not. It’s way too limited, especially on RAM, and flashing a new OS needs one of the 1024-bit carrier keys, not the developer key I cracked.