The Rotary Cellular Phone – the ultimate in retro low tech chic

August 14. 2006 We love this concept and we’re still trying to work out why. Maybe it’s because it will make people rubberneck at comedy sketch levels and maybe it’s because it sends up all those people who have their frightfully important cell phone conversations in public places. The Portable Rotary Cellular Phone is a fully functional, rotary dial, home telephone from the sixties except when you’ve put your sim card inside, it becomes a mobile phone. Each one begins life as one of those old sixties phones and replacing the internals is a time-consuming exercise, so as with any hand-built-to-order item, you’ll need to allow a few weeks of thinking music after you’ve sated the hand-built price tag – in this case US$399 for black or US$499 for red. The phone dials out like normal through the rotary interface and perhaps the best aspect of all is that incoming calls ring the original, loud, gong style metal bells (click here to listen to the ring), making it ideal to put on the bar next to you when you’re out on the town or wishing to make your presence felt in a public place. Of course it’s not all that portable, weighing in at around a kilogram and being roughly the size of a sixties home telephone, but that’s the point … it’ll work in any country with one of the 900MHz/1800MHz/1900MHz cellular bands (90% of the world) and we figure it’s worth its weight in started conversations.

« Back to The Rotary Cellular Phone – the ultimate in retro low tech chic