A brilliant 34-year-old engineer has built her own mobile phone with a rotary dial—and she did it because she despises texting and over-complicated smartphones.
Justine Haupt has spent the last three years developing the old school device so that it can fit in her pocket, get better reception, and maintain a battery life of up to 30 hours.
When she wrote about the retro cell phone on her blog, the website crashed from the sheer number of visitors clamoring to admire the retro gadget.
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Since Haupt has been inundated with requests from fellow smartphone haters begging for their own version of the phone, she is now offering DIY build-it-yourself kits to the public.
The astronomy instrumentation engineer from New York’s Brookhaven National Laboratory says she was was inspired to make the phone because she dislikes the culture and design of smartphones.
“I work in technology, but I don’t like the culture around smartphones,” says Haupt. “I don’t like the idea of being at someone’s beck and call every moment and I don’t need to have that level of access to the internet.
“I’ve never texted, and building this phone was in part so that I would have a good excuse for not texting. Now I can hold up this phone and say, ‘No, I can’t text.’”
While Haupt did once buy a Samsung Galaxy smartphone for her mother and played around on it herself, she said she got rid of the device after a month.
“I thought I would give it a try but I lasted less than a month with it before I went back to my flip phone,” she recalled. “I’m an engineer, I love technology, but the phone is not the way I want to do it.”
She is also not a fan of the smartphone’s interface or touch screen. (WATCH the video at the bottom)
“[It’s] absolutely horrible,” she added. “When you open an application and then you want it to go away but you don’t know if it is closed—that grates against the fiber of my being.”
Haupt’s appreciation of rotary dials inspired her project.
“I had had a flip phone for a long time and it can technically text so I wanted an even more dumbed down phone. I thought: ‘why not make a rotary dial phone?’” says the engineer. “I wanted it to fit in my pocket, be sleek, something I could actually use.
Haupt sourced a rotary dial from an old Trimline telephone, making sure the dial was small enough to fit on a phone which would slip into her pocket.
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“I was particular about getting one that could be as compact as possible.”
She then bought a cell phone radio development board from hardware company Adafruit in order to build a basic proof-of-concept prototype before designing her own circuitry.
Haupt used a 3D printer to create the cell phone case and she added speed dialing buttons so she could call her husband, David Van Popering, and her mother, Lorraine, at the click of a button.
“If I want to call my husband, I can call him by pushing a single button,” says Haupt. “I can call people more quickly on this phone than on my old phone. In rare cases when I want to call a new number, I do use the rotary dial and it is a fun, tactile experience.”
Haupt also added a display to the phone so that she could see messages and missed calls.
“It’s actual e-paper, the same material that you find on Kindles. Those kinds of displays are cool and are under-utilized in technology.”
The phone takes an AT&T prepaid sim card which is compatible with the cell phone radio.
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“I never expected to go viral with this,” Haupt said. “I didn’t want to sell it at first but everyone was clamoring and I got so many emails from people begging to buy a phone, and (then) someone suggested I should make a kit.”
Customers can buy the kit, which includes the circuit board and the 3D printed parts, from her company Sky’s Edge for $170—although they will have to source their own rotary dial.
“Now I’m looking at making a more inclusive kit that will come with everything you need,” Haupt added.
(WATCH a demonstration in this SWNS video…)
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This phone creation combines the worst of old phones – the rotary dial, which had gone out in favor of push button phones even before cell phones came in – with the bad part of cell phones – a microwave emitter. The end of the video shows this woman holding the microwave transmitter right up to her head. Bad habit.