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The evening current events show As it Happens on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) reports that American engineer Justine Haupt is the creator of a rotary-dial mobile phone.
Listen to the full 5m39s radio interview or read a shortened transcript on-line.
Justine Haupt, who created her own cellphone with a rotary dial, said she did so because she doesn't like how hyper-connected people have become in the world of smartphones.
"You can't browse the internet, it can't text, and all of that is intentional because I have a problem with how hyper-connected everyone is nowadays.
[...]Haupt, a 34-year-old space engineer, explains that although the phone operates on a 3G cellular network, it is not a smartphone.
"It's as un-smart as it can be, intentionally."
Haupt aims to use the phone on a daily basis and tried to make it as compact as possible, so it could fit in a pocket.
The phone does integrate some modern features, such as programmable shortcut buttons for calling specific numbers, a power switch, and a curved e-paper screen that displays basic information such as missed calls.
Though only briefly mentioned in the interview, the phone incorporates open source hardware from Adafruit Industries.
Full project description and documentation can be found on Haupt's webpage: http://justine-haupt.com/rotarycellphone/index.html
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @03:33AM
Found a Stromberg Carlson Type G shipboard phone, surplus in the '70s. It was brand new, must have cost the Navy a pretty penny, just like this one:
https://www.auctionzip.com/auction-lot/Internal-Ship-Telephone-USS-Roanoke_7CAF24E1CF/ [auctionzip.com]
The stainless steel cover plate is 1/8" thick, as is the rest of the grey painted box, weighs a ton, the phone is explosion proof. Used it for years as my main phone. Once we had an electronic exchange that could accept faster pulses I hot-rodded the dial (tied down the internal speed governor) to speed up dialing about 2x. But eventually I got tired of waiting for the higher numbers to rewind, and tired of the callus on my dialing finger--switched to touch tone dialing.