r/vintagemobilephones 27d ago

Technical [USA] 2G shutdown: uses cases for old phones

33 Upvotes

Yesterday T-Mobile 2G network went down in most (if not all) of US as planned. The remining question for this community: how can we use our phones in current environment?

Obviously, most of phones can be used as a mp3 player.

All offline games and apps should work on all phones where they worked 15 years ago.

Many phones can be used for VoIP (SIP) calls:
Symbian 9.4-S^3-Anna-Belle (using built-in/native client)
Some Nokia S40 phones (with built-in SIP client) like Nokia Asha 311, Nokia C3-01
Nokia N900 Maemo (using built-in/native client)
Nokia N9 MeeGo (using built-in/native client)
Most of Android phones (at least, starting from Android 4.1)
Some old iPhones (iPhone 4s,5,6)

Messengers:

Jabber/XMPP clients still work for
Almost all Symbian and Nokia S40 phones (if server does not use advanced TLS)
Nokia N900 Maemo (if server does not use advanced TLS)
Nokia N9 MeeGo (if server does not use advanced TLS)
All Android phones
All iPhones (if you can login to iCloud account or jailbreak the phone)

Windows Phone 8.1 and Win 10 Mobile phones

Telegram:
Symbian 9.2-S^3-Anna-Belle (3rd party clients)
Windows 10 Mobile phones (3rd party clients)
Some of Android phones (at least, starting from Android 5)

Some Windows Phones (their US operator's variants) support VoLTE, but the choice is limited

Verizon: Lumia 735
T-Mobile: Lumia 640 XL, Alcatel Idol 4S, Alcatel Fierce
AT&T: Lumia 640XL, Lumia 950

Windows 10 Mobile phones have 3rd party YouTube client and many other apps that still work including original email client. Many services have 3rd party clients


r/vintagemobilephones May 27 '26

Technical Modern internet on vintage phones: Major updates! All vintage phones are now supported!

48 Upvotes

I have recently made a few posts about my free public HTTPS proxy and my free public Yahoo/Gmail email proxies. Those have been popular and have clearly helped breathe new life into many old phones, but there was the issue of most phones requiring the installation of root certs, which not every phone allows. So, I’ve gone ahead and made a few new proxies. These new ones, instead of speaking TLS 1.0 or 1.1 to your phone and translating it to 1.2 or 1.3 to the web servers, communicate plaintext, unencrypted, with your phone. This entirely avoids the need for any installation of certificates.

I’ve just updated my website to reflect the changes.

Another major update: across all three five six HTTP(S) proxies, I have “fixed” google search, so you will now get results from 1ndev - a different search engine - instead of google’s “update your browser” error message. Both text and image searches are available, on all proxy ports except 3132, which instead simply uses the basic text only search from my wap site. More on this below.

Another update: for all three five ports, reddit will now behave just like it does on my wap site, meaning I’ve replaced the reddit homepage with a basic page where you can enter a subreddit, and you can browse and read the posts, but sadly not the comments. It’s not perfect, but it beats the previous setup of reddit simply blocking all traffic.

For all three five six HTTP proxies, the address and IP are the same:

Proxy Address: 15pmm01.com
Proxy IP: 176.103.221.33

There are now three five six options for HTTP proxy ports:

Proxy Port: 3127 (legacy HTTPS with full-ish HTML)

This is a compatibility adapter for port 3128, basically, which also simplifies HTML in a similar fashion as port 3130. So, read below about port 3130 and 3128, and 3127 is a combination of the two. You can find the CA root certificate at https://15pmm01.com/wap/. This port is only recommended if you want real HTTPS but your phone rejects the port 3128 proxy, or annoyingly prompts you to accept the certificate every time you load a page, even after you’ve installed it. Please note the certificate for port 3127 is different from the certificate for 3128. It is intentionally simpler, to be acceptable by older devices. The port 3127 proxy only accepts phones that can connect over SSL3 or TLS 1.0, whereas 3128 is for newer TLS 1.0 all the way up to TLS 1.3. Both of them connect to the external web with TLS 1.3; the only difference is how they connect to your phone.

Proxy Port: 3128 (HTTPS with full HTML)

This is the original HTTPS proxy, which you can read more about in this previous post of mine. Nothing has changed here, aside from Google search. Navigating to http://google.com or https://google.com, or any other variation that contains "google." in the URL, will load my custom web search page. Entering a search query will actually query 1ndev, and will return results from 1ndev. No, it’s not real Google, but it actually works, so I personally consider that an upgrade. This Google search replacement works exactly the same across all three ports. With port 3128, you can enter either https or http into your URL bar, for any website, and both will work, assuming your phone is cool without the cert, or you have the cert installed. Certificates are available for download at https://15pmm01.com/wap/.

Proxy Port: 3129 (HTTP with stripped-down text-only HTML)

This is perhaps the most interesting one, because it aims to enable even much older HTML-capable phones to access modern sites, by returning only the bare-bones text-only version of each webpage. You cannot open https:// links using this port, but that’s okay! You can just enter the http:// version instead, or leave that part off entirely, and the proxy will take care of everything for you. If, for example, you enter http://gsmarena.com, the proxy will fetch https://gsmarena.com, remove all images, javascript, etc. and return the basic, unencrypted HTML to your phone, with every link inside already rewritten to the http version, thus allowing you to navigate normally. So, it works similarly to a WAP gateway. By the way, I also host a WAP gateway - in case anyone needs one.

In order to maintain consistency across all three ports, the Google search replacement is exempt from the text-only style of port 3129. It works exactly like the other two ports, allowing both text and image searches.

Similar to the simplified Google search replacement, I have also made a simple replacement for the Wikipedia homepage. That said, please note that my wap homepage includes a Wikipedia and reddit reader, along with many other useful resources. It’s written in WML, meaning even the oldest web-capable phones can access it (all content tested and working on the Nokia 6310i), but it’s also perfectly usable from HTML-capable phones, and can be accessed regardless of which proxy you are using, or none at all.

Using port 3129, you will inevitably encounter websites that are broken - meaning they either display incorrectly, or not at all. If you find websites that don’t work, but you wish to browse them, please let me know. I will patch them one at a time until more or less everything works, even if many websites end up with simplified homepage replacements.

Proxy Port: 3130 (HTTP with full-ish HTML)

This is the middle-ground. This port is also only for unencrypted http:// and will work similarly to 3129, except that it will not meaningfully strip down HTML. It will (theoretically) strip javascript and cookie prompts, but will otherwise return unaltered HTML, just like 3128 would. So, this is for the not-quite-so-ancient phones that do not work with 3128 due to certificate issues, basically. Removing javascript should, result in smaller webpages, thus allowing a broader range of sites to load on your phone. Nothing of value lost, since old phones can’t use modern javascript anyway.

Proxy Port: 3131 (HTTP with stripped-down text-only HTML, paginated)

Exactly the same as 3129, but paginated. Meaning, if any webpage exceeds 5000 characters, it is split up into multiple pages, and it will show you the page number at the top and bottom, as well as let you continue to the next/prev page at the bottom. This is important for particularly wimpy phones, such as my Motorola PEBL, which can’t load hardly any pages even on port 3129, as they are simply too large for the poor thing. With port 3131, it can load everything just fine.

Proxy Port: 3132 (HTTP with stripped-down text-only WML, paginated)

Exactly the same concept as 3131, except it converts all HTML to WML, and paginates at 3000 characters. This is great for unbelievably wimpy phones, but is actually primarily for WML-only phones that cannot handle 99% of the internet as it’s in HTML. WML-only phones, however, do not allow you to use an HTTP proxy, and rather require a WAP gateway. Well, good news! I already mentioned earlier that I run a WAP gateway. Now I’m running a second one, which routes all traffic through this port 3132 proxy, thus allowing you to access practically any modern website on extremely old phones! It works wonderfully in my testing so far on my Nokia 6310i. I have updated https://15pmm01.com/wap/ to reflect this. It’s the same port 9201, except instead of 176.103.221.33 for the normal WAP gateway, the IP is 91.216.248.124.

******************************************************************************************

Now for email! I won’t bother explaining in detail how the email proxies are used, since you can read about them in this previous post. Those proxies, however, had the same issue as the HTTPS proxy, in that not every vintage device was down to accept the certificate. Therefore, I am now running unencrypted proxies parallel to the TLS 1.0 / 1.1 ports. Here is a breakdown of the available ports and their functions:

Provider & Protocol Address Port Securtity
Gmail IMAP gmail.15pmm01.com 1993 SSL / TLS
Gmail IMAP gmail.15pmm01.com 1465 SSL / TLS
Yahoo IMAP yahoo.15pmm01.com 2993 SSL / TLS
Yahoo IMAP yahoo.15pmm01.com 2465 SSL / TLS
Gmail IMAP gmail.15pmm01.com 1143 None
Gmail IMAP gmail.15pmm01.com 125 None
Yahoo IMAP yahoo.15pmm01.com 2143 None
Yahoo IMAP yahoo.15pmm01.com 225 None

Certificates are available for download at https://15pmm01.com/wap/.

Please make sure you understand, before using any of these proxies, that in doing so, you are intentionally circumventing modern cybersecurity standards. Therefore, when using any HTTP(S) proxy, please avoid transferring any highly sensitive or confidential information. When using any email proxy, I do not recommend using your real account. I take as many security precautions as I can, but I cannot guarantee perfect security. Understand that if my server were to be hacked, any data you transmit through these proxies, including your email passwords, could be compromised. You can read my privacy policy here, and the terms of use here. Yes, they are in German, but there are translators for that.

As you will see in the aforementioned terms of use, these proxies are only intended for use with vintage handheld devices. Using them with computers or modern devices is forbidden and can result in your IP address being banned. Android and iOS devices, no matter how old, are also not allowed at this time.

Update (11 June 2026): older Android and iOS devices are no longer blocked. You can use them ONLY with the port 3128 HTTPS proxy. You will need to install the certificate from my website before it will work.

Update (25 June 2026): Port 3128 HTTPS proxy now automatically fixes the built-in TouchWiz weather app/widget on older Samsung devices.

Update (30 June 2026): proxy ports 3131 and 3132 added, as well as WAP gateway info

Update (25 July 2026): HTTPS-lite proxy added on port 3127

Update (04 August 2026): My Google search replacement is unfortunately no longer working. The search engine that was powering it, 1ndev, has started blocking automated access to their site. I am trying to contact them in hopes that they will allow me to get it back up and running.

Update (05 August 2026): Google search replacement is back up and running, because a lovely individual over at 1ndev happily agreed to get it back up and running!


r/vintagemobilephones 15h ago

Samsung Sgh x830 in green!

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138 Upvotes

Super tiny! But functional of course! Feels like im talking to a tiny candy bar
Also! I have a issue. It wont take photos for some reason it says “FAILED!” Any1 know how to fix it?


r/vintagemobilephones 9h ago

Nokia Listen to your favorite song with Nokia 5730 XpressMusic

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27 Upvotes

Nokia 5730 XpressMusic featuring Paul Taylor & Latoya London.


r/vintagemobilephones 18h ago

Nokia One of my favourite phones to use

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73 Upvotes

Nokia 6630 is the first ever S60 smartphone to use 220mhz CPU, making a huge leap forward compared to it's predecessors like 6600 and 7610.

It runs Symbian 8, which is my favourite version, has lot's of earliest mobile games and N-gage support.

It's built really well, has no moving parts and rubber flaps, which makes it a tank, and ergonomics are some of the best too.

1.3MP camera can make some nice outdoors shots.

It also was the first S60 smartphone to finally have a decent sound quality, which is still acceptable to me, with an original headphones.

2G/3G still works in my area, and probably will continue to work for another 5 years, so I still can use it and other retro devices as intended for a while.

It's also really funny to realise that the most of 2005-2006 Nokia's Symbian lineup was using the same 220mhz CPU, as this phone from 2004. While it was great in 6680 and N70 (since these were extremely similar), later phones that ran Symbian 9.1 (E65, N71, N73, N80 etc) felt like a step backwards, since they had a heavier OS, and 2-4× screen resolution, all running on a hardware from 2004.


r/vintagemobilephones 12h ago

Alcatel Rare maxon mx7921

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16 Upvotes

r/vintagemobilephones 2h ago

Collection Some would say suffering from success

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1 Upvotes

r/vintagemobilephones 14h ago

HTC Emulating HTC Desire HD Sense 2.1 on a modern Android device

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6 Upvotes

r/vintagemobilephones 1d ago

Other This super weird Japanese PHS phone I bought, the AIWA AP-A102

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298 Upvotes

r/vintagemobilephones 1d ago

Nokia My Nokia 3310

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46 Upvotes

r/vintagemobilephones 1d ago

Apple iPhone 4S photo during vacation

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12 Upvotes

Croatia Rovijn taken in July


r/vintagemobilephones 1d ago

Nokia About maximum MMC support

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34 Upvotes

I used Nokia 9300 with MMC 1GB for music files. Can it support MMC 2GB ?


r/vintagemobilephones 1d ago

Trouble Shooting/Repairs Need help bypassing this screen

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6 Upvotes

I have a sony ericsson w100, i want to know if its a way to bypass this screen, i tried putting a sim card and to no avail, it let me to this.

Can i reflash it or something? I appreciate any help.


r/vintagemobilephones 1d ago

Nokia Nokia N73 Peak 2010 Nostalgia

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7 Upvotes

r/vintagemobilephones 1d ago

Nokia Nokia 3350 in green

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147 Upvotes

Nokia 3350 in green geniune Xpress-on cover.


r/vintagemobilephones 1d ago

Nokia Nokia 6630 pink rare

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50 Upvotes

I've received this beauty today 😘


r/vintagemobilephones 1d ago

Samsung Samsung SPH A880

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8 Upvotes

I forgot to post this last month


r/vintagemobilephones 1d ago

ZTE Weird Turkish Phone

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9 Upvotes

So i have bought this Turkcell T60, its a rebranded ZTE Blade S6 with some system and custom launcher. Apperantly it has 4G only.


r/vintagemobilephones 1d ago

Nokia Debrand Nokia N70 and flash latest firmware?

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15 Upvotes

I finally got my hands on a Nokia N70 in perfext condition but it is branded to TIM Italy. Also it runs a firmware from 2007 and it has some graphical bugs that I think can be solved by updating it. How can I find and flash the firmware? Phoenix should do the trick?


r/vintagemobilephones 2d ago

Apple Got an iOS 6 iPhone 3GS for 8 USD

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110 Upvotes

r/vintagemobilephones 1d ago

Nokia what nokia model is this? i unfortunately cannot find anywhere an exact model of nokia with the same housing/chassis as this

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9 Upvotes

does anyone know?


r/vintagemobilephones 1d ago

Samsung Samsung SGH X830 : The Return

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2 Upvotes

It has returned


r/vintagemobilephones 2d ago

Samsung More free xcovers

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28 Upvotes

I got these from my friend for free. They both work.


r/vintagemobilephones 1d ago

Samsung Two new phones in my collection: Samsung Galaxy S2 (GT-I9100) and Samsung Galaxy S3 Neo (GT-I9301I)

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15 Upvotes

Both of these were bought at a flea market today. They both work.


r/vintagemobilephones 2d ago

Apple Hey guys, just upgraded to the new iPhone 3GS. Did I make the right choice or should I have gone for the Nokia N97 or HTC Hero?

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191 Upvotes