Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/05/retro-1980s-brickphone-with-20.html
…
3 Likes
The only reasons I’d own one of these:
- If the rest of the dead space in the case was filled with battery, thus needing a recharge only once a month.
- Can be used as a blunt-force weapon. I’d like to think the person I attacked with it would be stunned by nostalgia, before being stunned by plastic.
- Finding the crappiest 80’s car I can and yakking into this thing in traffic, shooting dirty looks at anyone who stares too long.
10 Likes
8 Likes
I’ll stick with this.
3 Likes
Why is that hipster wearing a Swans shirt?
3 Likes
This reminds me of a friend circa 2008 who had an original phone like this. I can still remember the first time I saw her pull it out of her purse and answer it without a hint of irony. Her phone had bit the bucket and her dad had that brick phone lying around from years and years ago. Miraculously, it still worked and she was broke so…comically large phone it was.
7 Likes
I’ve always wanted something like this… not this ugly but something that just said “fuck it, I’m big I won’t fit in your pocket”. 1 TB ssd. real keyboard inside, batter that lasts for weeks and most importantly? you can talk on it like a real fucking phone. Also a compartment big enough to hold everything/anything you’d put in a wallet.
2 Likes
Now that “Vertu” has collapsed this is clearly the best option for latter-day Gordon Geckkos.
It’s a pity about the 2G, though. The novelty form factor probably doesn’t improve utility; but speaking a protocol that is dying out almost as fast as some natural languages consigns the thing to Oblivion in fairly short order.
One wonders if a bottom-feeder 3g chip would have really bloated the BoM that much. The tinkerer wonders if they could have used the capacious case to move cellular functions to a swappable PCMCIA or ExpressCard module…
1 Like
I worked at Radio Shack in the mid 1980s. Those phones were considered to be so generically mind-blowing that people would grab them and run out of stores with them, followed by panting, out-of-shape commissioned employees. They’d rip the back doors of strip mall stores to shreds with pry bars and car jacks. Once stolen, they were completely worthless, unless the thieves managed to get them programmed by a store’s one licensed copy of a program installed on the manager’s Tandy 2000 computer.
4 Likes
Assuming this is in the US, that’s not long before carriers dropped AMPS network support rendering it both a literal and figurative brick.
2 Likes
Need more phone bars.
4 Likes
It’s kind of silly to make it a phone in its own right, when it could be cheaper and better if it were just a shell that you put your real phone inside. You could probably fit a phablet and a giant battery in there, and then once you got bored you could just take your real phone out and use maps etc. like a normal person.
2 Likes
The boys in my cell seem quite taken by this phone. But it looks like it would take a lot of lubricant - or is that just the angle?
2 Likes
Wait, you mean I can drink and phone at the same time?!?!? Truly, technology has brought us marvels.
I was mildly interested until I read it was 2G GSM only. This is going to be as obsolete as an AMPS phone in the near future. Put in some generic but modern LTE brickphone guts and as many 18650s as you can cram in the device and you have a phone that will last a month or more between charges and make you look like an 80s drug dealer at the same time.
Canada. I would assume we did that around the same time.
Can someone please explain to me what is in the reflection of the screen at 1:56?! Then again, maybe I don’t want to know…
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
