Building a single smartphone from scratch would be a massive undertaking, even if the world were full of them. Now imagine trying to build one that's 100 times larger than its normal size and has almost all the same shapes and functions.
Youtuber Matthew Perkins () and Arun Maini () did exactly that, building a working replica of a . The finished project stood 6.74 feet tall and weighed 440 pounds, earning the couple .
Perkins began his build with the display, a massive undertaking that required turning it into a touchscreen. He commissioned a fabricator to make a piece of touch foil the size of the screen, which he secured in place with an optically clear UV epoxy glue.
The next challenge was finding a way to fit supersized versions of the phone’s components into a frame: the speakers, the three-lens camera array, the volume and power buttons, and the special function button. He built an aluminum frame with a cross-shaped bracket in the middle. The cameras in particular weren’t cheap, as Perkins opted to use both a and a to mimic the telephoto lens on the iPhone 15 Pro Max. The frame was also designed to be permanently mounted to a similarly scaled phone holder so that it could be rotated without giving the user a massive hernia.
The only major component they couldn't recreate was the operating system, as Apple's iOS is closed source. But using Android had two major advantages: happiness They recreated the feel of an iPhone home screen using a themed skin and were able to install Flappy Bird, something real iPhone owners have not been able to do in almost a decade.
The phone may be big, but it looks as functional as a portable iPhone. Maini and a group of friends took the phone out into the real world to test it out, and it can apparently make purchases at the touch of a button, send emails and make video calls. Whether it's functional or not, it's brave to take a $70,000 phone out onto the streets of London without a case.
