TL;DR
- This project combines the internals of a 2022 iPhone SE with the body of an old Nokia Lumia 1020.
- While you can still use the phone’s shutter button, the Lumia’s big 41MP camera has to go to make room for iPhone hardware.
- The iPhone is reportedly fully functional, though a bit odd to use with the home button rerouted to the phone’s back.
How many times have you been looking forward to a high-profile smartphone launch, only to have your expectations dashed when the early reports start coming in: the new phone is basically the same old thing we had before, only dressed up in a shiny new exterior? Most of the time, there’s some degree of hyperbole in that, but today we’re checking out one instance where that approach was taken quite literally.
Over on Reddit’s /r/hackintosh sub, user OceanDepth95028 shares their frankenphone creation: what they call the NokiApple LumiPhone 1020 SE. Essentially, we’re looking at the guts of an iPhone SE (2022) shoved into the hollowed-out carcass of an ancient Nokia Lumia 1020 Windows Phone handset.
While that sort of approach is probably the most sensible way to handle a total conversion like this, it also means abandoning maybe the best reason to hold onto a Lumia 1020: its big 41MP, 2/3-inch camera. Sadly, that’s go to go to make room for the Apple hardware, but thankfully the iPhone’s 12MP replacement fits well enough. Really, the only component that manages to stick around from the Windows Phone days is the phone’s front glass. And no, before you start getting your hopes up: the camera’s xenon flash also had to be sacrificed, and while it’s still physically present, the iPhone can’t take advantage of it.
In order to make this switcheroo work, OceanDepth95028 had to reposition some of the iPhone’s hardware to fit in its new Lumia home. Maybe the biggest there is moving the Touch ID home button around back under the camera — sort of a throwback to Android phones like the LG G6. There’s also some rerouting going on with the selfie cam, so it’s now in the normal sport for the 1020.
Other changes include sealing up the headphone jack (sorry, analog fans), swapping the micro USB port for Lightning, and the clever move of wiring the Lumia’s camera shutter button to the iPhone volume-down control, since it lacks a dedicated camera trigger.
OceanDepth95028 refers to this project as a custom one-off build, so if you want an iPhone-ified Nokia Lumia of your own, better pull out a soldering iron and get to work for yourself.
