LGD486 Wine Smart - Getting Started

Good evening.

If I had a dollar for every time a tech forum told someone like me to just upgrade, I'd probably have enough money for a new phone. However, I wouldn't get one. Too much fine working old tech is becoming "obsolete," simply because it doesn't run the hot new OS or have DDR5 or whatever the kids are on about these days. 

Brings us to our subject of today, my "new" phone, the LGD486! This phone originally came out in 2013, and is a mix between an early smart phone and a flip phone. I got mine a couple weeks ago off ebay after my Samsung A32 5g sadly kicked the bucket. Decided to downgrade and now here we are! 

Now, I'm not here to say that all of you should go out and get one. If I'm being honest, save the money, get a more modern flip phone. Why do I say that? While yes, the phone can read 4g networks, it isn't very great at it. I've had it for two weeks and have only seen it receive signal once. My theory is it's a very weak antenna, something I might look into possibly fixing. Any other theories as to why mine doesn't receive signal are welcome! I'm open to try other potential fixes, I've already tried being outside though. 

The OS the phone runs is Android KitKat 4.4.2. Ah, back when they gave Android fun names. And yes, that does mean this phone is a touchscreen! Great for people who, like me, want to learn how to t9 type but don't quite get it yet. I'm learning though, I swear! 

In terms of battery life, it's pretty good for a phone this old. It lasts about a day full charge, but you aren't meant to be on the phone all day. If I used it on 100% charge it'd probably drain in about two hours. This phone isn't meant to be used all day though, it's meant to be check in on throughout the day.

Some other things to note, it does have both a front camera and back camera, both of which are pretty good quality for a phone from 2013. Nothing professional quality, though. And for storage, sit down for this one, 2 whole gigabytes. Thankfully, it can read SDs up to 32 GB, so you will need to get one! The speaker sounds okay, but honestly just use headphones if you're gonna listen to music.

Some of you who have recently toyed with Android KitKat 4.4.2 may have ran into the same issue I have: you can't sign into your Google Account! Luckily, I found a tutorial to fix this, for now anyways, credits to Smu1zel for finding this workaround, I'll link the full tutorial here but here are the steps I used for mine:

1. Go to settings, Accounts & Sync, Add Account, and click "Existing"
2. For the email, put "[email protected]" and put in anything as the password
3. Click next, then click the option to sign in on the homepage
4. Once on the Classlink page, scroll down and click "Browser Check"
5. Scroll down all the way again and click the fourth black dot under "Contact." This will bring you to their YouTube.
6. Search for "famousboy-456" on YouTube Search
7. Go to the channel with that @
8. Click the TinyURL in their about me. It should be already on the main channel page
9. And just sign in! 2FA also works here!

And yeah! That's been my experience with this so far. It's been pretty fun messing around with it, and I recently got my hands on the original Android source, so maybe a custom flash is in order? We'll see. 

Have any questions, comments? Let me know! If you also have an LGD486 Wine Smart, or any old Android device for that matter, comment! I'll reply to whatever questions or comments you have, especially app related questions!

Farrah_Day signing off.