Intel gleaned from a smart phone

Ok so my main character got transported to a parallel universe containing a fantasy version of his own country's past. That country is considered Old World btw.

He accidentally lost his smartphone on arrival.

It just so happens a resident warlord manages to snag the device after going through so many hands who thought it was worthless due to its alien nature.

Before the battery on the thing ran out the warlord tasked his sorcerers of transcribing as much as they could from the device on to a more permanent medium.

What would most likely be the intel that is transcribe?

I was thinking that perhaps all they could access are stored maps, news articles and videos, and pictures of the main character.

Stuff about military tech have to be obtained by sending spies. Which of course involves sending people to a parallel universe and the event in which the phone came in was a result of a freak accident.

"What is this thing called Angry Birds?"

Well I suppose useless junk would be included before further processing.

Does this alternate reality have equivalent technology to smartphones, computers, etc. Because if they don't, I find it highly unlikely that they would even recognize that there would be information to get off the phone, let alone be able to figure out how to do it.

Regarding the information on the phone itself, presuming they're essentially scraping the SSD, they would get anything that was stored on the phone—contact numbers, saved maps, saved games, pictures, personal notes saved directly to the phone rather than the cloud, probably transaction logs (e.g. "clicked on this and then did that sort" of things, but a lot more technical), etc. News articles and such would likely only show up if they had been saved. Anything that needs internet access (i.e. anything on the cloud, anything requiring an internet connection to work, GPS, etc.) wouldn't work.

No nope they just look at what is on screen and copy it to paper.

In that case, they're probably going to end up with a few really random bits of information, and probably a lot of error messages from trying to connect to the internet and failing. This goes doubly if they don't speak whatever language the phone is set to.

Navigating computers/smartphones is not at all intuitive unless you're already familiar with how they work, so the characters would mostly be just randomly—really, truly randomly—poking around.

The phone is set to the same language as the part of the world it was transported to.

Also yes it is basically black box technology.

edited 7th May '13 10:39:56 AM by Worlder

How long will the battery last? Illiterate five-year-old children in villages in the middle of nowhere are able to figure out how to work modern tablets within a few months, to the extent of being able to work around blocks made by the manufacturer (to turn on the webcam); touchscreen technology really is very intuitive. But if it's a typical smart phone battery, it'll run out in a day or two, before anyone has a chance to get the hang of it.