Just before there was an iPhone in the pocket of every second person aged 9 and up, there was a wild era of phone designers doing anything and everything to try and find that perfect cellular device.
Writer Gerry McBride gathered up a bunch of those designs and shared them on Twitter. If I do say so myself, I wouldn’t mind picking one of these up when I inevitably break or lose my phone this festie season.
The one he kicks off the thread with is a Nokia phone that instantly reminded me of the beautiful, nostalgic, and now sadly irrelevant Tamagotchi.
Tell me this phone doesn’t take you back to looking after that weird digital pet thing whose shit you’d have to clean up.
My personal favourite has to be another Nokia. This one has the screen fold out horizontally above the keyboard to resemble a pistol.
Shooting your shot on this thing would be a must.
We’ve all heard of flip phones and the underrated Qwerty keyboard phones. But a phone that pivots? Unheralded.
I’d definitely love to whip this one out and swing that thing around for a laugh before calling my mum to pick me up from the gig because I’m tired and hungry.
Fuck knows how this lipstick case of a phone even functions.
I do rate the tag on the side but would never guess in a billion years that it’s a fully functioning cell phone.
Nokia seemed to be leading this charge into the weirdest mobile phone designs you could ever dream of.
This one had the screen in the middle with either half of the keyboard on the other side. You may ask ‘why?’ but early 2000s Nokia asked ‘why not?’
People in the replies were sharing some as well. Only one of the replies was of note in my opinion. I honestly don’t even know how to describe it.
It’s like if the PSP (remember those?) designers saw they had some spare lying around and thought: ‘eh, let’s just make it a phone’.
