Ideas for an old 1st generation iPhone

[cluele55]

Back in the stone ages, I bought a first generation iPhone, and I thought I was really cool. Very soon afterward, the 3G came out and then the 4G, and my formerly cool 1st gen iPhone was suddenly a laughing stock. So I got myself a 4s and I use it for pretty much everything (although, I am going for an Android next time).

The other day, I booted up the old 1G iPhone, thinking that I'd use it for an iPod or just download some games or apps onto it just for fun. Well, guess what? The original iPhone can no longer download apps, because it is not compatible with iOS 5, which is the requirement in the app store. Sooo, now I have a very shiny $400 electronic brick.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I can turn the old iPhone into? It was once jailbroken. I could jailbreak it again, since it's the old iOS. Maybe I could put Linux on it and use it for programming practice. But I am even willing to pull it apart and turn it into something else. I just don't know what. My imagination is failing me. I have heard of people turning their iPhones into remote controls, but that doesn't seem logical. It takes longer to turn the iPhone on than to just reach over and grab the real remote.

Any thoughts?

[centip3de]

Back in the stone ages, I bought a first generation iPhone, and I thought I was really cool. Very soon afterward, the 3G came out and then the 4G, and my formerly cool 1st gen iPhone was suddenly a laughing stock. So I got myself a 4s and I use it for pretty much everything (although, I am going for an Android next time).

The other day, I booted up the old 1G iPhone, thinking that I'd use it for an iPod or just download some games or apps onto it just for fun. Well, guess what? The original iPhone can no longer download apps, because it is not compatible with iOS 5, which is the requirement in the app store. Sooo, now I have a very shiny $400 electronic brick.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I can turn the old iPhone into? It was once jailbroken. I could jailbreak it again, since it's the old iOS. Maybe I could put Linux on it and use it for programming practice. But I am even willing to pull it apart and turn it into something else. I just don't know what. My imagination is failing me. I have heard of people turning their iPhones into remote controls, but that doesn't seem logical. It takes longer to turn the iPhone on than to just reach over and grab the real remote.

Any thoughts?

Jailbreak it and make it a shitty webserver?

[cluele55]

Jailbreak it and make it a shitty webserver?

Yeah, so far everything I've come up with starts with the word "shitty."

[mShred]

(although, I am going for an Android next time).

Yes.
But as for the quality of anything that you can make it, shitty is probably gonna be the adjective to describe it..
But, I mean it really depends. You could try and run an simple IRC bot or something on it? Like cent said, you could roll with a small webserver. I used to follow the iphone with cydia and all that, but I got out of that when I realized Android was the way to go. But was using aircrack-ng ever implemted into the iphone? You might be able to use it for something like that? Idunno.
You got me thinkin though. I've got an older brick of a Epic 4g Android phone sittin around. Wonder what I could do with that. I feel as though with Android the possibilities open up a little more considering the development package that Android throws at us.

[-Ninjex-]

OpeniBoot -> Backtrack -> Profit

[brutal_hacker]

All I can say is you must have been loaded to get one back then. Never been a fan of The iphones Im using the S3 at the moment and before that it was the htc hd7.

You cannot expect old hardware to be kept updated down to the fact if you stop making something there will be some day when no one will be using them down to breakages etc. Come on apples Iphone products are not drop resistant.

Now you can do what ninjex said or bin it. Its just a brick now really.

[mShred]

Backtrack on an iphone. That'd definitely be something.
That said, don't listen to the above post. He's butthurt about something, obviously. If thinking of new things to do with old hardware doesn't get you off, your nick prolly shouldn't have the word 'hacker' in it..

[cluele55]

Backtrack for iPhone?...interesting. I like that. There are discussions in a couple of Linux forums on that topic. I'll have to lurk around and learn more. You guys at least got my creativity going again. I already re-jailbroke the old iphone but holy cow, it's slow. I tap something and go off to visit a friend, come back, mow the lawn, do a load of dishes....and the dang thing is still loading. But now I am determined to do SOMETHING with it. I mean, it's just for fun and whatever I do can't possibly be worse than the brick it is now. And binning it wouldn't be a tragedy since it's been collecting dust for two years. Before it comes to that, though, I will at least pull it apart and see if there is any hardware to be salvaged.

Hey if people can make chargers out of Altoid cans, surely something can be done with a formerly smart phone.

-- Sun May 26, 2013 5:35 pm --

Ha ha, I had to come back with my N00b hat on. I was pretty excited about a pentest setup on a little old 1st gen. I saw that there was a Metasploit option too....way cool. Yes, I know this is better done from a computer (and I do have live CDs of BT and Metasploit), but I am interested in seeing what can be done from the iphone.

I had already jailbroken and unlocked the phone -- without a sim. Then I used Bootlace > OpeniBoot > iDroid. Everything was looking nice. Did a quickboot into iDroid just fine. Then, instead of going straight on to BackTrack, I got distracted and started tapping things (because that's what I do....I push buttons, click links, and tap things just to see what they do). The next time I tried to do a quick boot, the phone bricked. I mean COMPLETELY bricked. No sign of life. No reboot. No DFU mode. I got nuttin. I felt like a 6-year-old whose birthday cake fell on the floor.

It took a few hours for me to come to my senses. Or maybe it was magic. But I cleared out some temp files on my PC and popped an old unused sim card into the iPhone and finally it came back to life. I'm doing a restore now and will have to re-jailbreak it and start over. Crossing fingers....

[mShred]

lol gotta love bricking your phone. Sucks at first. But after you get in the habit of fixing it, you start to feel a lot more confident about the things you will be doing with it.

[cluele55]

I just wanted to update this thread, mostly for closure, with what I ended up doing with the phone. I re-jailbroke it and set up backtrack on it, the right way this time. Meanwhile, I set up a penetration testing lab using an old laptop as a metasploit loaded attacker and two Dell laptops I got on ebay VERY cheap -- one with XP and the other with Win95. Those were the victims. Mostly, I haven't done much with the setup because I haven't had a lot of time to play. But I did manage to use the iphone to find my first exploit on the XP. Then the poor little iphone went into shock or something because it froze up and wouldn't move again until the battery died and I had to reboot it.

The process using the iphone to attack was pretty painful because the iphone 1 is so slow and wonky. But I was pretty excited about the prospect of using a mobile device as an exploiter. Granted, it's not practical right now. Modern smartphones are way too expensive to be used for that purpose, but I still think it was neat that it COULD be done. That's all I wanted to know.

Not sure what else I'll try using the old iphone for. I might take it apart and use the parts for something. I know I don't have the patience to try another process with it. Too slow for my taste. Not sure how I ever used it as a phone. Thanks everyone for your suggestions.