Thanks For The Memories...

[Mike (Virginia Beach)]

Or should I say "The MEMORY".

Let me explain...

I have found two nice looking cell phones recently...both in a foot or two of water, and both buried at least 6 inches or more in the sand. One was a nice text-messaging friendly Samsung and the other a Blackberry. Both had cameras. Both had water in them and I washed them out real well with fresh water and put them in the oven at 170 for like 3 hours. They got dry and both produced some LCD "glow" and the Blackberry would brightly illuminate the light for the camera, but neither would not "work".

So before tossing them in the trash or throwing them in my "junk jar", I had the idea that MAYBE the add-on memory cards MIGHT still work. And indeed, they both had them installed. The one in the Samsung was 64MB and the one in the Blackberry was an impressive 1 gigabyte! Well BOTH of them worked perfectly, despite being immersed in salt water for who knows how long. All that is needed is an SD memory card adapter and a card reader/USB flash drive. Here is something for anybody that has found a cell phone to ponder. You MIGHT get some owndership info from the chip, though what I got in both cases was their photos they had stored. But I also got a perfectly good 64MB and a 1GB memory chip out of it. Below are some pics. I have a memory card reader/flash drive that I got at the "Five and Below" store for like $3. Now it's a 1 GB flash drive.

Here's the phone, after drying...
[attachment 101360 Memory1.jpg]

Here's the memory card, coming out of the phone...
[attachment 101361 Memory2.jpg]

Here it is next to a dime...tiny, huh?
[attachment 101363 Memory3.jpg]

Here it is all lined up in order...the end cap, the chip, the adpater, the card reader, and the other end cap...
[attachment 101364 Memory4.jpg]

Here it is with the chip in the adapter and the adapter in the reader...
[attachment 101365 Memory5.jpg]

And here it is, all together...a fully functioning 1GB USB flash drive. And I'm using this one at work, to boot computers for re-imaging and whatever else I want to. There were some family pictures on there, of an Indian couple (maybe Pakistani), but no identifying info.
[attachment 101366 Memory6.jpg]

So anyway, before you go trashing any cell phones, remember the memory chip!

 

[Mirco]

Tonight in the beach I found a SIM card with 347*** number and full of very sexy names, numbers and addresses. Cingular.
If the owner is here I am willing to return!! Very sexy! You won`t be disappointed!

 

[doindadiggin]

Hi mike be careful those phones can be traced so be careful what you do with that stuff , a mate of mine found a phone and put the sim card in his phone to locate the owner ,and while it was in his phone the owner had the sim card blocked and it shut down his phone.terry in oz

 

[Mike (Virginia Beach)]

Hmmm...that's interesting, but in my application, it's a simple memory card and not subject to such "deactivating". But I DO applaud the owner, in taking the proper actions to safeguard himself...he obviously had something there he felt was worth protecting. This phone had some middle-eastern type songs/music on it and some pictures...that's it. But another might have had an address book, personal data...who knows? And in that case, I would have returned it. In this "worst case" scenario (at least for the OWNER!) I get a free memory card. No heartburn here!