Creating just one smartphone from scratch would be a huge undertaking, even if the world was full of them. Imagine trying to create one that is 100 times its normal size, with almost all the same forms and functions.
YouTuber Matthew Perkins () and Arun Maini () did exactly that, creating a working copy . The finished project measured 6.74 feet tall and 440 pounds, earning the couple .
Perkins started his build with a screen, which was a big job that required conversion enter the sensitive touch screen. He had a fabricator make a screen-sized piece of touch foil and fixed it in place with an optically clear adhesive UV epoxy.
The next challenge was finding a way to fit oversized versions of the phone’s components into the frame: the speakers, the triple-lens camera array, the volume and power buttons, and the dedicated function key. He made an aluminum frame with a cross-shaped support in the middle. The cameras were not particularly cheap, as Perkins chose to use both as well as a Mimicking the telephoto lens of the iPhone 15 Pro Max. The frame is also designed to be permanently mounted on a phone stand that has been enlarged to the same size so that the user can rotate it without causing massive tearing.
The only major component they couldn’t recreate was the operating system because Apple’s iOS is closed source. But Android had two main advantages: Bliss OS they recreated the feeling of the iPhone home screen using a themed skin and they were able to install Flappy Bird – something that actual iPhone owners couldn’t do almost ten years.
The phone may be big, but it looks as functional as a handheld iPhone. Maini and a group of friends took the phone out into the real world to test, and it appears it can make tap-to-pay purchases, send emails and make video calls. Whether it’s functional or not, bringing a $70,000 phone to the streets of London without its box is brave.
