Yes this is a real phone. No you can’t buy it. Which is a shame, because I absolutely would.
All hail Justine Haupt
According to her Linkedin, Justine Haupt is a Instrumentation Developer for Cosmology, Astronomy, and Quantum Networking. I don’t know if I should be calling her Dr. Haupt. Her Linkedin doesn’t say if she has a Ph.D. But I will tell you that she’s a doctor of awesomeness as far as I am concerned.
Her personal blog gives the full details of what she calls a “Portable Wireless Electronic Digital Rotary Telephone.” Even the name is awesome! There’s not a single hint of any marketing mumbo-jumbo and that’s what’s so great about it.
This is what I really like
© Justine Haupt
This is a real working phone that probably has better call quality than anything you have. It has real buttons for speed dial and an e-paper display for incoming caller ID. It has a 10-LED bar display for signal strength, which is total overkill and I really like total overkill.
And this is what I love
This phone would be totally at home in a science fiction TV show from the 1960s or 1970s. Everything from its black-and-white aesthetic to its tactile nature just screams old sci-fi. And that makes it look like someone’s doing REAL IMPORTANT WORK.
No, you can’t surf the internet on this baby. You can’t even text. Forget about even playing that snake game that used to come on Nokia phones. No, this is a REAL CELL PHONE for people who need to take REAL LIFE OR DEATH CALLS. You whip this thing out in a restaurant, people are going to know that they need to quiet down. After all you are probably from some alternate universe and you’re here to make sure that some unspeakable interdimensional terror doesn’t come to pass. Pull out this phone, people are getting out of your way. I guarantee it.
And yet, you can’t buy it at Solid Signal.
I like to promote the great stuff we offer at SolidSignal.com, but this phone isn’t one of them. Yeah, we have AT&T phones but I’m feeling like AT&T would probably pass on this one, even though the dial is salvaged from an old Western Electric phone. (Western Electric was the manufacturing arm of AT&T a long time ago.)
Even so, this phone is just so intrinsically amazing that I can’t stop looking at its picture. It’s so honest and real and how cool is it that someone just built it. How cool is it that someone thought, the world needs a rotary cell phone with a big black antenna. And then they built it! Which is totally amazing and I think this is the sort of thing our Solid Signal customers do all the time.
No question that this is a great DIY project. I wonder how many of our readers have great DIY projects they’d like to share? If you’ve got one, leave a comment below with more info!
