A while back I got a legacy NTT DoCoMo N505i (one of the first DoCoMo i-mode phones to support FL 1.0). Well, somebody was selling it for $20 (I bet it sure cost a pretty penny back in 2003). Definitely not anything remotely like the new FOMA lineup.

The problem was it came without a charger, and no accesories. There isn’t a store online that sells this sort of stuff (that I was able to find in English). And what’s more, the battery was depleted and was pretty much non-standard … or so I thought …

After removing the battery I found it was just a li-ion battery 3.7V/770. Thankfully the info was in english (mostly). …

After traveling to Radiocrap and a local electronics store called You-do-it Electronics (MIT students will know this one, cause that’s where they shop for all their last minute needs!) and getting a lot of strange looks, I thought I’d be out out luck …

But, I wasn’t about to give up quite yet … I remembered my pentax camera uses a very simliar battery … and came with it’s own charger … hmmm.

The battery didn’t seem to fit the profile of the charger … then I started thinking out of the box. It didn’t take long (maybe a minute) … I came up the following battery mod to charge it.

All I did was wire up the 3 inputs (pos, neg, and ground with some spare wiring) Not pretty but it worked (Rob Hall would smile) … I didn’t even solder it (cause I still need to use my pentax camera … well maybe not, my nokia 3250 has a 2.0 MP).

I should point out that it worked without incident because the batteries were both made in Japan. Your mileage may vary. I could probably improve on the design by making a custom template that inserts into the charger and do away with the wires … but that’s the realm of Phillip Torrone.

Anyways, now I can power the DoCoMo phone.

It’s got a pretty sweet UI, and all around pretty spiffy for 2003. It still kicks the ass of anything we have here in the States.

I had seen the phones in action before, but now I have a model that I can actually play with. Well, not all of it, but at least some of it. I can even throw it around since it is not a $500+ dollar phone.

Here are some photos of the “battery charge hack”:

Here are some of the handset:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Flash, Mobile, flashlite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.