You can still buy a new HTC phone in 2021 HTC Desire 21 Pro specs Display: 6.7-inch, Full HD+ SoC: Snapdragon 690 RAM: 8GB Storage: 128GB Cameras: 48, 8, 2, and 5MP Front cameras: 16MP Battery: 5,000mAh Software: Android 10 launched in January 2021
The fact that old phones have to be abandoned and thrown away because of software is a travesty. Google should have a legacy store for older versions of android.
Indeed. I cannot factory reset my Galaxy Ace Plus or my Galaxy S4 because if I did, I'd lose all of the apps on there, with no way of getting them back. We need some sort of archive with all of the older versions of apps.
with apple it is even worse. apple is great as due to its sturdy support for 6 years (unlike android 1-3 years). but after 6-7 years apple becomes a brick as suddenly all apps are unsupported, especially during move from 32 to 64 bit.
Agreed. Loading the old apks downloaded off of dubious mirror sites can lead to bad things happening like data theft etc but we still want to use 'legacy' hardware as the software guys put it.
@@alexm566 My first PC (besides the 3 Commodore computers I had before it) had a 20MB HARD DRIVE! RAM was probably either 512K or 640K in it. My new phone that I'll be ordering in a few days is going to have 8GB RAM and 256GB internal storage. We really have come a long way, but sadly programmers get lazier and lazier. Instead of writing efficient code that uses the least amount of resources possible, they compile in dozens of entire libraries where they may only be using 1 single function from the entire library, which could bloat the program by 20 times the necessary size, and system requirements. If programmers actually cared (or their bosses), and wrote efficient code, pretty much every app could run better and faster on 10 year old devices with 1/10th the RAM and storage than current apps run on todays flagship phones.
So do I, as I had a Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus which had Android 2.3! Chrome would never work on it, due to needing Android 4.x. Nowadays, I'd say Android 5.0 is the minimum; most apps will start to run into issues below Android 5.0.
I remember Android 2.2 and even 2.1 having decent app support in 2012 and 2013 even though my phones were ARMv6 based. ZTE Blade (the version with 512MB RAM and 5MP camera, but sadly mine had LCD instead of Amoled) and Galaxy 3 i5800. In summer 2013 I installed CyanogenMod 10.1 (Android 4.2.2) and overclocked the ZTE Blade but just a month or two later it stopped recognizing my SIM card so I switched to my secondary/backup phone, the Galaxy 3. I used the Galaxy 3 with Android 2.1 until September 2013 when I bought a HTC Desire Z which I used CyanogenMod 10.1 on.
If I recall correctly from having my own S-On'd HTC Rezond in the past, you can still mod the phone with an unlocked bootloader and S-On. You just have to manually flash the boot image after flashing a ROM ZIP in TWRP or whatever. So flash the zip, reboot the phone to bootloader, flash the boot.img you extract from the ROM zip manually, and then reboot again and it should be good to go. Keep in mind this was from like 8 years ago so I really don't remember the exact process, I've long since gotten rid of the thing. But as for general instructions this is what I had to do to get ROMs on my HTC.
Yeah, you just have to flash the boot.img from cmd fastboot after flashing the rom .zip from twrp, I clearly remember doing this on an htc one x and htc explorer, both with s-on and unlocked bootloaders Ps. For this htc sensation I recommend android 4.4.x rom, android 5 and 6 will run very poorly, even 7 will better than 5 and 6 if its available. There two versions run like ass on low end phones, I can say that from very large testing experience with various models. You need something like a galaxy s3 neo at worst to have a decent experience on 5 or 6
You can really find some good deals on old phones. A couple of days ago I managed to get a fully working Galaxy S2 for just €2 (£1.70) that's literally in almost perfect condition.
Nice. As an owner of a store-bought S3 who has held an S2 before, I'm honestly a bit jealous, because it was really pleasant in hand and had a very different feel to it
@@W4NKER look around 2nd hand sites and recycling centers dude. I'm using a Huawei p30 pro I got for £35 on Facebook and it works fine, small crack at the top but idc. Also have a PC that runs new titles at 60+ fps I got for £90 from a local pc recycling center
I'm pretty surprised how well HTC has aged considering being capable of playing quite few games today compared to my samsung phone that runs Android 4.1.2 with only 512MB ram.
Honestly HTCs were built like tanks. I had to use my old HTC One M9 for a couple days and I was pretty blown away at how well it preformed 6 years later
@@raki31 you're not wrong, even my M9 heat up really easily, but I think HTC was always known for that. But for real, their build quality and hardware was always amazing, it was just places they cheaped out that ruined the experience like camera and cooling
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@@goincha3870 Well not always, HTC One M7 and M8 was not overheating as much as M9 and 10.
Before I had a long history with HTC with phones like the HD2, Desire, Desire S, Sensation, HTC EVO 3D, HTC One ( M7, M8, M9) and i always loved it never let me down. I wish HTC would still be around like they used too the Sense UI will forever be in my memory it was way above it time. Right now I own a Xiaomi and honestly i would swap too a flagship HTC in a hearbeat....but one can only dream. Thanks for the video it really brought back fond and great memories. (P.S: i still have my HD2, One M7 and EVO 3D working for good old memories)
I recently pick up a M9+, never had an HTC phone, and damn the 2k screen still good, so good. Unfortunately was built with a mediatek processor, instead of Snapdragon one, cause the lack of custom roms support is a shame. Also gpu is weak and the short lifesupport made the rest. :(
@@MrOoh50 mine was the snapdragon and if i hadnt sold it by accident ( left it on fb marketplace cause i was at first willing too sell it but then when i changed my mind it was too late the person already arrived) i would still run it cause it was a amazing phone
Actually, as I can remember correctly, the s-off was an option as you could still root the phone with s-on. But, everytime you installed a rom on It you had to flash the boot.img directly through adb to make it work. I was rooting those phones back in 2012
IT WAS YOU!!! lol I saw this for sale and was like nah it'll be there by next week and it WASNT! fr though i'm happy for you so glad to see what it can do, i remember wanting this phone so badly when it came out
A big contributing factor to old smartphones like these being so slow is eMMC degradation. Back then, non-volatile flash memory had a much shorter lifespan compared to storage in modern phones- it takes eMMC less than 5 years to degrade, so when you're talking about a phone with eMMC that is 10+ years old, it's going to be quite slow regardless of what software it's running. I had a lot of great android devices turn into e-waste from the era when their eMMC inevitably degraded to the point of them failing to boot. UFS/NVMe in modern phones can last 10+ years, so I imagine newer phones will age much better.
@alpha2x So long as the chips aren't tied to their respective logic boards and you could find the part, you could probably replace them with a hot air station, a way to reball the chip (massively difficult without a stencil) and some flux. I do agree though, it's really sad
Would be interesting to get some sources on this other than "trust me bro". I only know of 3 device models that universally suffered from eMMC degradation, and that's the Nexus 7, LG G3 and G4, and it doesn't happen from it just being a certain number of years old but wearing prematurely. And having seen the CPU usage on multiple old (2011-2013) phones like this with updated gapps and all the bloat that brings with it, blaming it on eMMC is just nonsense. These phones run pegged at 100% for anything but basic tasks and as mentioned multiple times in the video, RAM is at a premium which doesn't help either. Go get a cheap first gen Moto G (XT1032) and update all the google app crap from the stock versions it comes with. It'll go from reasonably usable to painful just from doing that alone.
@@Knaeckebrotsaege It is like in computers, SSDs degrade due to constant read and write cycles and their performance decreases over time due to reallocating damaged blocks, and it is not only seen in those old phones, but also consoles like the Wii U that have an eMMC as a main unit have started to die due to the degradation of their storage
I bought a similar old HTC phone with a plan of converting it into a full fledged cycle computer but like 95% of my projects I never get around to it. I feel such phones nowadays are only really suitable for a single task like a cycle computer or a media player or something like that as you have to keep everything to a bare minimum and keep the android system as vanilla as possible to keep the speed up.
It's pretty close to my Samsung Galaxy nexus 4 in terms of specs but ~100mb more in ram. Wonder if android version 4.4.2 is still good for anything today?
That home screen brings back so many memories.. I had a HTC Legend as my first smartphone and shortly after that swapped to a HTC Desire HD although I don't think those ever got upgraded from the Android 2.x version that they had. Definitely much simpler times when I was shocked about being able to watch TH-cam on a phone.. albeit on a 1Mb connection that meant high quality was not really an option (remember when TH-cam mobile only had a choice between HQ and LQ?)
I love the look of this phone so much. My first smartphone was a Wildfire S, which has been made near unusable thanks to only having I think a 512MB ROM, and after Android ya can't even get Play Services installed. The design is lovely though, and imo for a phone of its age and price, has a decent camera.
Man... as a carboot regular I know the pain of going through dusty forums filled with dead links and broken embedds in order to breath some life into older hardware. It's digital archeology from aeons ago... more than 10 years. Just imagine the amount of functional e-waste around the world.
The only guy I know on TH-cam that can buy a two pound phone or a seven pound laptop and play games like a boss absolute legend ! Just shows that all the million sub channels that don’t deserve it really don’t sometimes and the creators that deserve millions of subs are grinding to get there …. One day this channel will have a GOLD Play Button mark my words guys
Ahhh, it's nice to see the sensation, it was my first personally bought smart phone from my first ever job... Held on for a good while... Till the screen smashed on a train track...
Ah yes, the Android era where despite having decent CPU and GPU, they became basically useless for everyday task in like a year and a half because they were so freaking cheap on RAM and internal storage (and you were extremely lucky to have even one Android upgrade).
The android era when the phones were useless out of the box because they couldn't do much more than calls and sms without an SD card. Not to mention the OS itself was feature-starved.
The market in India for old and legacy devices is enormous so it's no surprise that you'll find some apps in that localization working as well as that keyboard did.
Me looking for electronics and components: Prices upwards of $300 even if decade old and widely regarded as trash at the time. Budget Builds: Mildly dusted gaming PC for £7
Feel ya, I live in Italy and for some strange reason here everything used is priced ridiculously high, I found old trashed netbooks for 50€/$, and old core 2 quads for 30+€/$...
It's pretty bad the only GPUs that are priced correctly is like the 9000 Nvidia cards and a couple gens before and after and the 775 era of bords and even some of those are horribly priced sadly I don't think this will end until global shipping is fixed
@@trashtronics1700 desktop gaming is dead for now. instead, just go buy a rtx 3060 LAPTOP. it's pretty much the same price as a desktop 3060 except you also get a whole portable computer along with it, including a fast screen. and on that tier of performance, the 3060 isn't even thaaat much slower than the desktop one. only a masochist would buy a gpu right now.
@@lorenzozanellati5844 My only explanation is that there are still enough people who'd buy stuff like that, I guess. Somebody who needs a token device with no regards to specs (e.g. a buddy of mine sold a janky laptop from '08 for 50$ because the buyer needed PC with a webcam during pandemic), and who doesn't really know the value of hardware and that the old isn't always the best deal. I can imagine alot of people who didn't care about computers suddenly having to get them due to shift to remote work
I've got the exact phone but a Telus model as I'm in Canada, I did happen to get it rooted and installed a custom rom but now that device refuses to even turn on. Kinda sucks honestly, it was a decent little phone for audio playback.
CeX is actually quite good when you know what you're doing. They certainly seem to be cheap enough for storage: I managed to get 8GB DDR3L and a 512GB Samsung SSD for £50.
You highlight an issue with how anti-consumer mobile phones, and ARM platforms are in general. And I really do feel your pain. Locked down bootloaders, hell not even the bootloaders and motherboard firmwares are standardized. x86 has EFI firmwares which makes it possible to boot from a universal ISO from some random USB. Instead it's something arbitrary, unstandardized, radically different and confusing. For example the raspberry pi requires its GPU to run some code before it can boot up. There's no easy way to throw in another OS. You have to pray to god someone knows how the device internals function and create a custom recovery for it. Instead of writing quality code hosted on git, the SoC OEMs fork Linux, implement god knows what kind of custom kernel patches to make it work with their particular SoC, and just ship that precompiled kernel. That's why you still see modern phones running on Android 11 with an older kernel version. They can't transfer over the kernel patches willy nilly to a newer one because it'll just break...
I still miss the Sense UI 3.6 with the weather screensaver/wallpaper animation with the 3D effects.I wish i could ge these on any phone .And the audio on them like you said is good till this date. My evo 3d had SRS audio.
Maaaybe there is a possibility to swap the phone's internal memory to a external sd card. I've heard of people running android from sd cards before. This would fix most slowness from old phones you get, as the main culprit of these phones being sluggish even on stock firmware is the slow and dying emmc flash.
Please make more videos on old phones ☺️. It's so satisfying to watch. I live in Bangladesh and here that much old phones aren't available online to buy on that cheap price . So I can't do that much stuff with old phones . You're making my dream of making old phones alive again . Finally a TH-cam channel that I can relate to . Take love from Bangladesh🇧🇩🇧🇩🇧🇩🇧🇩
I owned the T- Mobile version of the Sensation 4G and had installed CyanogenMod rom and overclocked it. I really liked it. I sold it to my friends dad and still owns it but it's now using Galaxy S7.
It’s amazing how this phone has the same amount of RAM as an Xbox 360 or PS3. I’m impressed you got it working as well as you did but I hope you get a better phone eventually.
This was my first phone with a front facing camera. iPhone 4 and face time was the year prior. I miss HTC dearly. Just bought a order 6 pro very recently
I remember that era of HTC so well 🥰 Back when phones were exciting! Had an M7, m8, and a terrible HTC touch Pro 2 running Windows mobile. Runs pretty well nowadays, and your description of finding working links to old stuff was so accurate 😂 (I kernel-ex'd a Windows 2000 install a year or so ago and it took ages to find working links)
Hi, I've commented previously but thought I'd put something on here to help anyone watching this with the same S-ON Problem. Thankfully it's quite easy to circumvent, this is how I've done it previously. Unlock the Bootloader Flash TWRP Extract the boot.img file from the new ROM to the pc Flash the rom zip file Go back to fastboot mode Flash the new boot img Done.
i actually had this phone but the volume button broke off so i needed to go to the setting every time i wanted to change the volume lmao, bring back memories though
used to have this exact phone, found out they did a sensation xe which is the exact same spec that I could see besides a slightly higher clock count and larger battery didn't stop me from flashing it as the xe to get some more performance :)
Have you tried opera mini for browsing? It does most of the conversion at their end and should be good for video playback for youtube? Great video either way :)
Well, I actually have been worried about these older phones simply becoming unusable, not due to time, but due to all of our research on these, all the work people have done to crack, fix, mod and optimise these 10+ yr old phones are just being thanos snapped away and we're doing nothing to preserve it. I had the same issues you had some years ago trying to mod a sony shakira just for fun, cuz I remember those being easy to mod, just to find out most roms were gone, but I still found a single working link for one back then, and then, after I had already installed it I was like "should I really delete this? Wont anyone else need this? It was a pain in the ass to find this"
A phone repair store just gave me 2 galaxy tabs (sgh-i975r) running ice cream sandwitch that he want me to custom rom and make usable. Great video as always btw, I love your videos, especially ur cellphone ones!
Ahhh I love me some HTC phones. Since the One (m7) to the 10 and eventually a U11+, Seeing you go through learning about the special version of htc_fastboot brought back memories of going through the same process. Still got an old version that works on win 10, never bothered to find a new one cuz it genuinely just works.
My first smartphone was an HTC Rezound here in the US. Very similar to the sensation but with a FULL GIG of RAM. It actually came with low android 3.0. I unlocked the bootloader (you have to get an unlock code from HTC, probably doesn't work anymore) and S-offed. You had to physically short a few contacts under the battery door to do it. After not using it for a while I finally flashed the latest rom on xda and wiped nearly everything off it including system apps and used it to just play games. Before android I loved jailbreaking ipods, but ever since 2011 I haven't owned another Apple device. And every smartphone I've had has been rooted
Remind me of my first smart phone when i was a teen back in 2011 i recalled, a samsung galaxy young, man.. That tiny candybar design really cute but it is quite hard to type using qwerty haha
My first ever smartphone as a kid was the HTC Wildfire (not the S). This Sense UI look is dear to me. And I was looking at the Sensation like the be all end all of the phones. Because the Wildfire is the cheap budget version of the Sensation. I'll let you guess how functional it was even in its prime. But it is a surprisignly amazing MP3 player no joke. Slap in a 32 gig sd card, fill it up with songs, and grab your old wired headphone. The fact that it can just barely let you go on the internet to check the weather is a nice benefit.
I owned one of those back in the day (XE variant) ended up slightly overclocked with some custom rom and light-weight version of one m7 launcher. Solid little phone
I was just scrolling through and said to myself, that looks like my old phone. Dead Space is another game that runs nice on the phone if you want something else to play on it. I think I might grab a battery off of ebay and use a few of your tricks to make it run better. My friend at the time got one of these too, spent many nights drinking at the bars. He wouldn't shut up about how much he loved it. xD
To be fair, Ultra 64 emulation is a huge pain and can even bring Threadrippers to their knees depending on how accirate you want to go. Mupen64 never ran well even on my 2018 LG Aristo 2 Plus.
I was messing around with an old phone too a time ago and all of my errors trying to flash or unlock boot loader was because of windows 10. You need to try in a xp machine or a windows 7. It eventually will work in the first try. It’s something with driver compatibility and windows 10 can’t recognize the device the way it should
If I can make a suggestion, when you find links for programs that don’t run in windows 10, run a virtual machine on a whatever version of windows the program is built for that might work.
I still have an S-OFF HTC Desire which I put CFW onto every now and then to screw around with. Works great as a light web server (HTML only, of course, but still). But the battery is kaput so it's a bit pointless as a phone. Which is a shame because it used to be quite great.
Reminds me of when I used to use a HTC Desire S back in the day. Solid little unit. Think I gave it to my dad and started dabbling in Windows Phone.... Well that kinda failed lol. The old Desire S always felt solid as in the hand with all that aluminium. 👍
I had one of these as my daily driver. In fact back in 2012 I had to use some skechy rootsoftware where I had to shorten a sim pin with another pin on the backplane while booting in a specific timeframe. Only so I could get it rooted :)
This reminds me of getting a free Galaxy S2 (GT-i9100) and trying to update the stock and carrier-defaced Android 2.3.3 to at least a clean 4.0.3. Once I found out it isn't really any more useful even with that, I tried a custom ROM cause.. hey it was free so if I brick it, whatever. So it ended up with Lineage OS, running Android 7.1.2 ... on a 2011 phone
I owned a sensation XE which came with some beats headphones and I didn't like it as I purchased it for audio and they didn't use any plastic in construction of the headphone jack so the headphones would short on the metal of the phone.
I think android 4- OS's are pretty vulnerable to kingo root U could use a *system app uninstaller* which are used to remove uninstallable bloatware And maybe you couldve have tried to push up the clock speed and gpu clockspeed with kernel tuner or similar apps
This was my first smartphone. I had intended to install ROMs when the device was more current but it was so weird. All of the information for doing so seemed to contradict itself. Also for some reason the HTC bootloader unlocker never worked. That said the phone still booted up and functioned until I sent it off to the recycler.
I've been there modding that exact phone, I ended rolling the ROM version back, then s off and boot loader unlock. From there flashed a rom. Then the fun started and it had no wifi and couldn't make calls. I flashed the original back on it and shoved it in the draw.
Can you do a review on the Volvo convertible tea cup edition?
also know as the
"tea-70"
*FuriousDriving want to know your location*
😂
Really though that's a lovely c70 and we want to see more.
High pressure turbo?? 🧐
You can still buy a new HTC phone in 2021 HTC Desire 21 Pro specs
Display: 6.7-inch, Full HD+
SoC: Snapdragon 690
RAM: 8GB
Storage: 128GB
Cameras: 48, 8, 2, and 5MP
Front cameras: 16MP
Battery: 5,000mAh
Software: Android 10
launched in January 2021
The fact that old phones have to be abandoned and thrown away because of software is a travesty. Google should have a legacy store for older versions of android.
Indeed. I cannot factory reset my Galaxy Ace Plus or my Galaxy S4 because if I did, I'd lose all of the apps on there, with no way of getting them back. We need some sort of archive with all of the older versions of apps.
with apple it is even worse. apple is great as due to its sturdy support for 6 years (unlike android 1-3 years). but after 6-7 years apple becomes a brick as suddenly all apps are unsupported, especially during move from 32 to 64 bit.
@@ligametis 7 years is an incredibly long time to own a phone, at that point the owners of those generation phones are an extremely low %.
@@reisshep I still see iPad 3 or 4 quite often.
Agreed.
Loading the old apks downloaded off of dubious mirror sites can lead to bad things happening like data theft etc but we still want to use 'legacy' hardware as the software guys put it.
You just made me remind of early days of Android, where RAM is limited every single MB is precious
756MB RAM is actually a lot in 2011. Heavy games back then uses 20-30MB at most. My phone in 2011 has a 233MB RAM and works without issues.
my first PC had 256 MB RAM running Windows XP...768 cannot be this bad, it's the garbage software.
@@alexm566 My first PC (besides the 3 Commodore computers I had before it) had a 20MB HARD DRIVE! RAM was probably either 512K or 640K in it. My new phone that I'll be ordering in a few days is going to have 8GB RAM and 256GB internal storage. We really have come a long way, but sadly programmers get lazier and lazier. Instead of writing efficient code that uses the least amount of resources possible, they compile in dozens of entire libraries where they may only be using 1 single function from the entire library, which could bloat the program by 20 times the necessary size, and system requirements. If programmers actually cared (or their bosses), and wrote efficient code, pretty much every app could run better and faster on 10 year old devices with 1/10th the RAM and storage than current apps run on todays flagship phones.
I remember when Android 2.3 used to be the minimum requirement for basically any app
So do I, as I had a Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus which had Android 2.3! Chrome would never work on it, due to needing Android 4.x.
Nowadays, I'd say Android 5.0 is the minimum; most apps will start to run into issues below Android 5.0.
I remember my HTC Desire had to lose all HTC software to make room for Android 2.3. Heady days.
I remember Android 2.2 and even 2.1 having decent app support in 2012 and 2013 even though my phones were ARMv6 based. ZTE Blade (the version with 512MB RAM and 5MP camera, but sadly mine had LCD instead of Amoled) and Galaxy 3 i5800.
In summer 2013 I installed CyanogenMod 10.1 (Android 4.2.2) and overclocked the ZTE Blade but just a month or two later it stopped recognizing my SIM card so I switched to my secondary/backup phone, the Galaxy 3. I used the Galaxy 3 with Android 2.1 until September 2013 when I bought a HTC Desire Z which I used CyanogenMod 10.1 on.
69likes hmm
Well few years ago they DID. Sadly not now. Im sad cuz they almost killed jelly bean
If I recall correctly from having my own S-On'd HTC Rezond in the past, you can still mod the phone with an unlocked bootloader and S-On. You just have to manually flash the boot image after flashing a ROM ZIP in TWRP or whatever. So flash the zip, reboot the phone to bootloader, flash the boot.img you extract from the ROM zip manually, and then reboot again and it should be good to go. Keep in mind this was from like 8 years ago so I really don't remember the exact process, I've long since gotten rid of the thing. But as for general instructions this is what I had to do to get ROMs on my HTC.
I was about to say the same exact thing, thanks for doing it 😅
Yeah, you just have to flash the boot.img from cmd fastboot after flashing the rom .zip from twrp, I clearly remember doing this on an htc one x and htc explorer, both with s-on and unlocked bootloaders
Ps. For this htc sensation I recommend android 4.4.x rom, android 5 and 6 will run very poorly, even 7 will better than 5 and 6 if its available. There two versions run like ass on low end phones, I can say that from very large testing experience with various models. You need something like a galaxy s3 neo at worst to have a decent experience on 5 or 6
Did it work with a custom kernel, cyanogenmod and similar, or were you limited to sense based roms?
Reminds me of the weird shlick where I had to use MTKClient to force an Alcatel to go into fastboot.
You can really find some good deals on old phones. A couple of days ago I managed to get a fully working Galaxy S2 for just €2 (£1.70) that's literally in almost perfect condition.
Where do people get these kind of deals 😂
@@W4NKER eBay
@@jbritain I actually got it at a street market. It was thrown inside a box of mostly destroyed phones going for €2 each.
Nice. As an owner of a store-bought S3 who has held an S2 before, I'm honestly a bit jealous, because it was really pleasant in hand and had a very different feel to it
@@W4NKER look around 2nd hand sites and recycling centers dude. I'm using a Huawei p30 pro I got for £35 on Facebook and it works fine, small crack at the top but idc. Also have a PC that runs new titles at 60+ fps I got for £90 from a local pc recycling center
I'm pretty surprised how well HTC has aged considering being capable of playing quite few games today compared to my samsung phone that runs Android 4.1.2 with only 512MB ram.
Honestly HTCs were built like tanks. I had to use my old HTC One M9 for a couple days and I was pretty blown away at how well it preformed 6 years later
@@raki31 you're not wrong, even my M9 heat up really easily, but I think HTC was always known for that. But for real, their build quality and hardware was always amazing, it was just places they cheaped out that ruined the experience like camera and cooling
@@goincha3870 Well not always, HTC One M7 and M8 was not overheating as much as M9 and 10.
Ha! I have a LG phone that runs android 2 with less than 384 MB of RAM!
Ach, I was *technically* right when I predicted the HTC Salsa! CeX, you traitor!
I love all your videos
It's so much fun seeing old hardware being put to good use
it's always in good use people are just wasteful by buying new tech
Man, htc phones were ahead of their time, really wish they were still good
Nope. All rebranded OEM crapware now.
I know, right? I had 3 HTC One M7's just because they were so cool
The HTC golden era. Their ads were amazing at the time
my first android was htc one s until it's cpu cooked
@@genfunk8209 HTC aspire HTC evo 3d and HTC evo 4g lte and the HTC att had
2:00 That was the price with a 2 year phone service contract. Buying the phone ala-carte would have been closer to $500-$600.
Exactly, I remember buying the lower end version of this phone, the Wildfire and then the Desire series. The Wildfire back then was £150.
@@ItsPikablu shiiiieeetttt, the HTC wildfire man...
Before I had a long history with HTC with phones like the HD2, Desire, Desire S, Sensation, HTC EVO 3D, HTC One ( M7, M8, M9) and i always loved it never let me down.
I wish HTC would still be around like they used too the Sense UI will forever be in my memory it was way above it time.
Right now I own a Xiaomi and honestly i would swap too a flagship HTC in a hearbeat....but one can only dream.
Thanks for the video it really brought back fond and great memories.
(P.S: i still have my HD2, One M7 and EVO 3D working for good old memories)
I recently pick up a M9+, never had an HTC phone, and damn the 2k screen still good, so good. Unfortunately was built with a mediatek processor, instead of Snapdragon one, cause the lack of custom roms support is a shame. Also gpu is weak and the short lifesupport made the rest. :(
@@MrOoh50 mine was the snapdragon and if i hadnt sold it by accident ( left it on fb marketplace cause i was at first willing too sell it but then when i changed my mind it was too late the person already arrived) i would still run it cause it was a amazing phone
Actually, as I can remember correctly, the s-off was an option as you could still root the phone with s-on. But, everytime you installed a rom on It you had to flash the boot.img directly through adb to make it work. I was rooting those phones back in 2012
In Fastboot, not ADB
@@farsatf.6034 Yup
Same
1:34 I didn’t actually know that. Thanks for that little tidbit
IT WAS YOU!!! lol
I saw this for sale and was like nah it'll be there by next week and it WASNT!
fr though i'm happy for you so glad to see what it can do, i remember wanting this phone so badly when it came out
A big contributing factor to old smartphones like these being so slow is eMMC degradation. Back then, non-volatile flash memory had a much shorter lifespan compared to storage in modern phones- it takes eMMC less than 5 years to degrade, so when you're talking about a phone with eMMC that is 10+ years old, it's going to be quite slow regardless of what software it's running. I had a lot of great android devices turn into e-waste from the era when their eMMC inevitably degraded to the point of them failing to boot. UFS/NVMe in modern phones can last 10+ years, so I imagine newer phones will age much better.
@alpha2x So long as the chips
aren't tied to their respective logic boards and you could find the part, you could probably replace them with a hot air station, a way to reball the chip (massively difficult without a stencil) and some flux. I do agree though, it's really sad
Would be interesting to get some sources on this other than "trust me bro". I only know of 3 device models that universally suffered from eMMC degradation, and that's the Nexus 7, LG G3 and G4, and it doesn't happen from it just being a certain number of years old but wearing prematurely.
And having seen the CPU usage on multiple old (2011-2013) phones like this with updated gapps and all the bloat that brings with it, blaming it on eMMC is just nonsense. These phones run pegged at 100% for anything but basic tasks and as mentioned multiple times in the video, RAM is at a premium which doesn't help either.
Go get a cheap first gen Moto G (XT1032) and update all the google app crap from the stock versions it comes with. It'll go from reasonably usable to painful just from doing that alone.
@@Knaeckebrotsaege It is like in computers, SSDs degrade due to constant read and write cycles and their performance decreases over time due to reallocating damaged blocks, and it is not only seen in those old phones, but also consoles like the Wii U that have an eMMC as a main unit have started to die due to the degradation of their storage
I bought a similar old HTC phone with a plan of converting it into a full fledged cycle computer but like 95% of my projects I never get around to it. I feel such phones nowadays are only really suitable for a single task like a cycle computer or a media player or something like that as you have to keep everything to a bare minimum and keep the android system as vanilla as possible to keep the speed up.
You could still use these as an IP Webcam, dashcam or maybe for torrent seeding (?)
I personally use a cheap old phone in my car as a gps navigator
It's pretty close to my Samsung Galaxy nexus 4 in terms of specs but ~100mb more in ram.
Wonder if android version 4.4.2 is still good for anything today?
Well, that would be assuming you get Bluetooth sensors that work with it.
I do the same thing but with laptops.
That home screen brings back so many memories.. I had a HTC Legend as my first smartphone and shortly after that swapped to a HTC Desire HD although I don't think those ever got upgraded from the Android 2.x version that they had. Definitely much simpler times when I was shocked about being able to watch TH-cam on a phone.. albeit on a 1Mb connection that meant high quality was not really an option (remember when TH-cam mobile only had a choice between HQ and LQ?)
I really miss the old Sense UI.
Especially the flip clock that actually flipped. It's actually impossible to find a similar clock widget today
I love the look of this phone so much. My first smartphone was a Wildfire S, which has been made near unusable thanks to only having I think a 512MB ROM, and after Android ya can't even get Play Services installed. The design is lovely though, and imo for a phone of its age and price, has a decent camera.
I had that phone too, it was pretty good for the price though.
@@unisonarcanine I agree! Really nice little thing, it just didn't age well with that storage mostly.
Man... as a carboot regular I know the pain of going through dusty forums filled with dead links and broken embedds in order to breath some life into older hardware.
It's digital archeology from aeons ago... more than 10 years.
Just imagine the amount of functional e-waste around the world.
Lovely times of task killer rooting and custom ROMs 😁 thx for bringing some nice memories mate 🤛
The only guy I know on TH-cam that can buy a two pound phone or a seven pound laptop and play games like a boss absolute legend ! Just shows that all the million sub channels that don’t deserve it really don’t sometimes and the creators that deserve millions of subs are grinding to get there …. One day this channel will have a GOLD Play Button mark my words guys
Ahhh, it's nice to see the sensation, it was my first personally bought smart phone from my first ever job...
Held on for a good while... Till the screen smashed on a train track...
Ah yes, the Android era where despite having decent CPU and GPU, they became basically useless for everyday task in like a year and a half because they were so freaking cheap on RAM and internal storage (and you were extremely lucky to have even one Android upgrade).
The android era when the phones were useless out of the box because they couldn't do much more than calls and sms without an SD card. Not to mention the OS itself was feature-starved.
The market in India for old and legacy devices is enormous so it's no surprise that you'll find some apps in that localization working as well as that keyboard did.
Me looking for electronics and components: Prices upwards of $300 even if decade old and widely regarded as trash at the time.
Budget Builds: Mildly dusted gaming PC for £7
Feel ya, I live in Italy and for some strange reason here everything used is priced ridiculously high, I found old trashed netbooks for 50€/$, and old core 2 quads for 30+€/$...
It's pretty bad the only GPUs that are priced correctly is like the 9000 Nvidia cards and a couple gens before and after and the 775 era of bords and even some of those are horribly priced sadly I don't think this will end until global shipping is fixed
@@trashtronics1700 desktop gaming is dead for now. instead, just go buy a rtx 3060 LAPTOP. it's pretty much the same price as a desktop 3060 except you also get a whole portable computer along with it, including a fast screen. and on that tier of performance, the 3060 isn't even thaaat much slower than the desktop one. only a masochist would buy a gpu right now.
@@lorenzozanellati5844 My only explanation is that there are still enough people who'd buy stuff like that, I guess. Somebody who needs a token device with no regards to specs (e.g. a buddy of mine sold a janky laptop from '08 for 50$ because the buyer needed PC with a webcam during pandemic), and who doesn't really know the value of hardware and that the old isn't always the best deal. I can imagine alot of people who didn't care about computers suddenly having to get them due to shift to remote work
@@MrCh0o yh I guess you're right, still it's ridiculous
I've got the exact phone but a Telus model as I'm in Canada, I did happen to get it rooted and installed a custom rom but now that device refuses to even turn on. Kinda sucks honestly, it was a decent little phone for audio playback.
That part with the cup of tea and the cassette tape, with Bon Jovi in it just made my day.
Have a really nice day, good Sir.
My first ever smartphone, right there. Oh the nostalgia
Love when CEX sends the wrong things. Usually down to stores classifying it as the wrong phone
CeX is actually quite good when you know what you're doing. They certainly seem to be cheap enough for storage: I managed to get 8GB DDR3L and a 512GB Samsung SSD for £50.
You highlight an issue with how anti-consumer mobile phones, and ARM platforms are in general. And I really do feel your pain.
Locked down bootloaders, hell not even the bootloaders and motherboard firmwares are standardized. x86 has EFI firmwares which makes it possible to boot from a universal ISO from some random USB.
Instead it's something arbitrary, unstandardized, radically different and confusing. For example the raspberry pi requires its GPU to run some code before it can boot up. There's no easy way to throw in another OS. You have to pray to god someone knows how the device internals function and create a custom recovery for it.
Instead of writing quality code hosted on git, the SoC OEMs fork Linux, implement god knows what kind of custom kernel patches to make it work with their particular SoC, and just ship that precompiled kernel.
That's why you still see modern phones running on Android 11 with an older kernel version. They can't transfer over the kernel patches willy nilly to a newer one because it'll just break...
I still miss the Sense UI 3.6 with the weather screensaver/wallpaper animation with the 3D effects.I wish i could ge these on any phone .And the audio on them like you said is good till this date. My evo 3d had SRS audio.
We need more phone videos like this one
Maaaybe there is a possibility to swap the phone's internal memory to a external sd card. I've heard of people running android from sd cards before.
This would fix most slowness from old phones you get, as the main culprit of these phones being sluggish even on stock firmware is the slow and dying emmc flash.
Please make more videos on old phones ☺️. It's so satisfying to watch. I live in Bangladesh and here that much old phones aren't available online to buy on that cheap price . So I can't do that much stuff with old phones . You're making my dream of making old phones alive again . Finally a TH-cam channel that I can relate to . Take love from Bangladesh🇧🇩🇧🇩🇧🇩🇧🇩
I owned the T- Mobile version of the Sensation 4G and had installed CyanogenMod rom and overclocked it. I really liked it. I sold it to my friends dad and still owns it but it's now using Galaxy S7.
I love the sensation! I remember going nuts over the UI, animations and the gaming performance. The clock was so awesome for the time!
Great video, and thank you for including the legendary Jazz Grim Fandango sountrack in there :) Cheers!
woah great video, very interesting keep the good work up
It’s amazing how this phone has the same amount of RAM as an Xbox 360 or PS3. I’m impressed you got it working as well as you did but I hope you get a better phone eventually.
Am I the only one who recognized the background music? Lucas Arts Grim Fandango. The soundtrack to that has many gems.
This was my first phone with a front facing camera. iPhone 4 and face time was the year prior. I miss HTC dearly. Just bought a order 6 pro very recently
I remember that era of HTC so well 🥰 Back when phones were exciting! Had an M7, m8, and a terrible HTC touch Pro 2 running Windows mobile. Runs pretty well nowadays, and your description of finding working links to old stuff was so accurate 😂 (I kernel-ex'd a Windows 2000 install a year or so ago and it took ages to find working links)
Hi, I've commented previously but thought I'd put something on here to help anyone watching this with the same S-ON Problem.
Thankfully it's quite easy to circumvent, this is how I've done it previously.
Unlock the Bootloader
Flash TWRP
Extract the boot.img file from the new ROM to the pc
Flash the rom zip file
Go back to fastboot mode
Flash the new boot img
Done.
i actually had this phone but the volume button broke off so i needed to go to the setting every time i wanted to change the volume lmao, bring back memories though
iirc, you could achieve S-off by shorting the board in a specific spot. I did this with my amaze 4g.
used to have this exact phone, found out they did a sensation xe which is the exact same spec that I could see besides a slightly higher clock count and larger battery
didn't stop me from flashing it as the xe to get some more performance :)
Thank you for struggling through 6hrs, and dealing with the slow thing to deliver an amazing video
Have you tried opera mini for browsing? It does most of the conversion at their end and should be good for video playback for youtube? Great video either way :)
Well, I actually have been worried about these older phones simply becoming unusable, not due to time, but due to all of our research on these, all the work people have done to crack, fix, mod and optimise these 10+ yr old phones are just being thanos snapped away and we're doing nothing to preserve it.
I had the same issues you had some years ago trying to mod a sony shakira just for fun, cuz I remember those being easy to mod, just to find out most roms were gone, but I still found a single working link for one back then, and then, after I had already installed it I was like "should I really delete this? Wont anyone else need this? It was a pain in the ass to find this"
A phone repair store just gave me 2 galaxy tabs (sgh-i975r) running ice cream sandwitch that he want me to custom rom and make usable. Great video as always btw, I love your videos, especially ur cellphone ones!
Hey glad to see you're back!!
Use XP or 7 for messing with these older phones, trust me they really don't like 10
I've always loved these phone videos of yours. Good job on this one.
YAY! You’ve started doing videos closer together again!!!! 👍👍👍
Ahhh I love me some HTC phones.
Since the One (m7) to the 10 and eventually a U11+, Seeing you go through learning about the special version of htc_fastboot brought back memories of going through the same process. Still got an old version that works on win 10, never bothered to find a new one cuz it genuinely just works.
Finally, a new Budget-Builds phone video
Sense UI was way ahead if its time. Mamy features were years later adopted from Samsung.
My first smartphone was an HTC Rezound here in the US. Very similar to the sensation but with a FULL GIG of RAM. It actually came with low android 3.0. I unlocked the bootloader (you have to get an unlock code from HTC, probably doesn't work anymore) and S-offed. You had to physically short a few contacts under the battery door to do it. After not using it for a while I finally flashed the latest rom on xda and wiped nearly everything off it including system apps and used it to just play games. Before android I loved jailbreaking ipods, but ever since 2011 I haven't owned another Apple device. And every smartphone I've had has been rooted
Remind me of my first smart phone when i was a teen back in 2011 i recalled, a samsung galaxy young, man.. That tiny candybar design really cute but it is quite hard to type using qwerty haha
You can use a mhl cable to hook it up to tv and with bluetooth controler have some nice emulation console.
My first ever smartphone as a kid was the HTC Wildfire (not the S). This Sense UI look is dear to me. And I was looking at the Sensation like the be all end all of the phones. Because the Wildfire is the cheap budget version of the Sensation. I'll let you guess how functional it was even in its prime. But it is a surprisignly amazing MP3 player no joke. Slap in a 32 gig sd card, fill it up with songs, and grab your old wired headphone. The fact that it can just barely let you go on the internet to check the weather is a nice benefit.
Damn that phone was good! My phone in 2011 was a singlecore 600mhz sd s1 with 384 mb of ram, and android 2.3.6. With a wopping 240x320 pixels screen
I owned one of those back in the day (XE variant) ended up slightly overclocked with some custom rom and light-weight version of one m7 launcher. Solid little phone
Oh the memories, I had this one back then. Loved it and still have it. The screens destroyed and it doesn't work but it's still in a drawer somewhere
3:57 the mighty "boot lock unloader" :)
10:31 Man, it looks so odd seeing those rendered as squares instead of spheres due to having played obscene amounts of SM64 when I was younger :D
I was just scrolling through and said to myself, that looks like my old phone. Dead Space is another game that runs nice on the phone if you want something else to play on it. I think I might grab a battery off of ebay and use a few of your tricks to make it run better. My friend at the time got one of these too, spent many nights drinking at the bars. He wouldn't shut up about how much he loved it. xD
To be fair, Ultra 64 emulation is a huge pain and can even bring Threadrippers to their knees depending on how accirate you want to go. Mupen64 never ran well even on my 2018 LG Aristo 2 Plus.
i used that phone back in the day, now i feel nostalgia =D
Same ^^
CeX? The retail store?
Those were awesome!
I was actually kind of upset when they shut down those stores in the USA.
Didn't know it still existed.
Awesome content as per usual!! Thanks for posting!
I really like these phone videos, good stuff!
just in time good vídeo as always. I was expecting this cellphone could do more but nothing is perfect i Guess :D
great video lad keep up with the good work
The HTC Sensation XE was my first smartphone and it was absolutely great. Sold it a long term ago but still very fond of it.
KISS Launcher might be a good fit for this device. NewPipe also has a "Legacy" fork
I was messing around with an old phone too a time ago and all of my errors trying to flash or unlock boot loader was because of windows 10. You need to try in a xp machine or a windows 7. It eventually will work in the first try. It’s something with driver compatibility and windows 10 can’t recognize the device the way it should
I had the HTC Sensation and i was quite happy with that Phone a long time. Thank you for that Video.
The sensation XE was my favourite phone ever and my first flagship much love for these
If I can make a suggestion, when you find links for programs that don’t run in windows 10, run a virtual machine on a whatever version of windows the program is built for that might work.
I still have an S-OFF HTC Desire which I put CFW onto every now and then to screw around with. Works great as a light web server (HTML only, of course, but still). But the battery is kaput so it's a bit pointless as a phone. Which is a shame because it used to be quite great.
Rolled up toilet paper as a stand... BRILLIANT :D
Reminds me of when I used to use a HTC Desire S back in the day. Solid little unit. Think I gave it to my dad and started dabbling in Windows Phone.... Well that kinda failed lol. The old Desire S always felt solid as in the hand with all that aluminium. 👍
I had one of these as my daily driver. In fact back in 2012 I had to use some skechy rootsoftware where I had to shorten a sim pin with another pin on the backplane while booting in a specific timeframe. Only so I could get it rooted :)
I appreciate the grim fandango music in the background
"S-ON to S-OFF"
*shudders*
Bad memories of my HTC One M8 flooding back
HTC had the best names. Sensation and Salsa sound amazing at least. It’s crazing to think phones as good as this are 10 years old.
This is the first time I am watching you and I have become your fan .
This reminds me of getting a free Galaxy S2 (GT-i9100) and trying to update the stock and carrier-defaced Android 2.3.3 to at least a clean 4.0.3. Once I found out it isn't really any more useful even with that, I tried a custom ROM cause.. hey it was free so if I brick it, whatever. So it ended up with Lineage OS, running Android 7.1.2 ... on a 2011 phone
I used to have the TMo Sensation. Great phone. I had it rooted and alt ROMs installed.
There was a cheap Voda phone in 2017 which had a launch price of 19£!
I owned a sensation XE which came with some beats headphones and I didn't like it as I purchased it for audio and they didn't use any plastic in construction of the headphone jack so the headphones would short on the metal of the phone.
Love the music choice from transport tycoon!
I think android 4- OS's are pretty vulnerable to kingo root
U could use a *system app uninstaller* which are used to remove uninstallable bloatware
And maybe you couldve have tried to push up the clock speed and gpu clockspeed with kernel tuner or similar apps
Root and tegrak overclock it.
I really like these cheap phone videos. Would love to see a "Phone" playlist on your youtube channel.
This was my first smartphone. I had intended to install ROMs when the device was more current but it was so weird. All of the information for doing so seemed to contradict itself. Also for some reason the HTC bootloader unlocker never worked. That said the phone still booted up and functioned until I sent it off to the recycler.
that phone is surprisingly usable, would love to see a new ROM on it
I've been there modding that exact phone, I ended rolling the ROM version back, then s off and boot loader unlock. From there flashed a rom. Then the fun started and it had no wifi and couldn't make calls. I flashed the original back on it and shoved it in the draw.