They even include an owner in-joke, which means someone in the production must have owned one of these phones. Everyone I lent the phone to would pick it up the "wrong" way -- they would put the external screen to their face, like every other phone. But the mic and speaker were on the back. I had to quickly find the scene in the movie here:
The project used PayPal to gather downpayments, PayPal decided to lock the funds for months (almost a year or maybe longer IIRC) because they saw money coming in but no confirmation of goods coming out. And, you know, when it comes to big companies, no explanation is sufficient, you are guilty of something because some heuristic said so, so the funds were locked, legal threats didn't work (try threatening a company with the power of a small/medium country), and by the time they got their money back, key people who were going to work at a discount to cover key milestones had moved on.
If there was actually a holdup of funds that killed the project, and eventually the funds were released, that's an even worse story. I didn't think there could be a worse story. It would mean that the project fell apart while they were waiting on cash, then when they got it they just treated it like a personal windfall. IIRC I ended up out $1.5K on the thing.
I don't know who you are or where you were but the paypal problems were pretty well announced and _I_ was there. The project was already facing delays because a key person who was needed to make the board layouts was held up with the also now dead DragonBox Pyra handheld.
I have no idea where you think the money went, how much you think there was, but it was a constant game of trying to drum up enough activity to gain attention of potential customers to bring in enough down-payments to pay the salaries of the small number of people working on the project while having enough money to buy parts. The money went into salaries, parts, nobody bought hookers or blow with it, and certainly nobody got anything but stress out of that project in the end. I believe Joerg Reisenweber paid a lawyer out of pocket to try to get PayPal to release the funds.
Sadly, that day never came ...
> We don't ask "why?", we ask "why not?"
It appears that in this case, as the original battery aged, its internal apparent resistance (ESR) increased beyond the original design expectations, to a point where the phone won't work when plugged in to a charging cable because despite the charging cable most likely being able to deliver sufficient power at DC, it had too much impedance to supply it quickly enough. When current is demanded from a source that has too high impedance to supply it, the voltage drops. This will result in significant voltage ripple to the power supply of the digital circuits, which can cause logic to not function correctly.
Adding a large capacitor basically replaced the filtering and stabilization role of the original battery.
Interestingly people often intentionally remove capacitors for side channel measurements and glitching attacks.
I recall having to spin with my finger in a spiral to zoom in.