Reviving My iPhone 5
I have recently been doing a bit of "archeology" around my home — as I like to call it — and I've been getting into exploring some of my old phones. For example, I have an iPhone 8 with a broken camera that used to belong to my sister, that contains basically all of my things from mid 2019. However, the phone I've been focusing on the most lately is my mom's old iPhone 5.
The iPhone 5 came out in 2012, the same year as iOS 6 which was the last update with the original skeuomorphic design. It introduced the lightning port, and it had a larger screen than the previous year's iPhone 4S by about half an inch, but it was also thinner and over 16g lighter (which was almost a fifth of the phone). And, of course, the subject of one of Jacksfilms's best songs.
This specific iPhone 5 is the Silver model with 16GB, which my mom got around January 2013. She used it for about 2 years until she upgraded to the iPhone 6, after which it sat in a drawer somewhere until I retrieved it in 2019, and it has stayed in my room since.
Now, I used it for a while around that time, even syncing my Apple ID into it though it only has my Notes loaded in. I downloaded a few apps, but that's about it, and then I didn't use it for another 6 years.
I've tried to charge it in the past and use it, but despite saying it was charging it never booted up. However, after I got into this iPhone archaeology again about 2 weeks ago, I decided to try and charge it one more time, and I left it in my room to do so for a few hours at 6 PM, and at around midnight when I went back to it, it booted up!
After playing around with it a bit I realized that the battery was pretty unstable. Fortunately it isn't bulging out or anything but it does die whenever it feels like it, though it does last about an hour and a half which is pretty neat!
Pictured above are the apps I downloaded when I got the phone in 2019, which were a few of the same ones I had on my actual iPhone, with some social media and some of my favourite games at the time.
Having access to an old iPhone again would have already been cool enough, but I only now realized an amazing power that this specific phone has.
The last software update the iPhone 5 received was iOS 10, which came out in 2016. The software update after that, iOS 11, did introduce some nice features, but it was the first update that made older applications unusable, so I lost a lot of games I had on my iPad at the time and I could only delete them, and this devastated me.
Skipping forward to now, with this phone that has the iOS before all of that happened, I decided to check the App Store to see what else I could download, and then I realized… I could actually download these games again!! (as long as they weren't flat-out deleted from the App Store)
There are so many games here that I could spend multiple entries just talking about them — in fact, that's what I am planning on doing! I played these games a tonne when I was a kid, and I have a lot to say about them, especially now that I am seeing them again for the first time in over 8 years.
Additionally, there are a few games that you can play the older versions of since the current ones require newer iOSs, and I have started playing an older version of Pocket Planes from scratch this way which has been super fun!
I wanted to share this small bit of the discovery first, just to give the background information, but I'll definitely be sharing stuff about these specific games — and any others I can find — as I keep playing them!
