Engineer Created a Rotary Mobile Phone and It’s Awesome

It’s amusing to me that my kids have never really had to use a rotary phone. Even in my youth, button dial phones were much more common and mobiles become commonplace as I grew up too. I’m 35 now just for reference. However, the older tech of a rotary phone may be just that, old, but it’s still a perfectly good way of getting the job done.

Justine Haupt, 34, says that she hates text messages and generally doesn’t like the hyper-connectivity that comes with smartphones these days. Despite it being my job too, I’m sure we can all agree that we feel the online strain some times too.

“I don’t like the hyper-connected thing. 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. Whenever I want to look something up, I’m more than happy to do so when I am at my computer. 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.'”

The phone doesn’t text, I mean, it would be hard given the apparent lack of a traditional display on it. It just has a hulking great rotary dialer right on the front, which I find bloody hilarious. It’ll last 30 hours on a single charge, which we all know is more than a day. There’s a small e-paper display in there to show missed messages and call, and it does have a speed dial feature too.

The hipster forces may fall over themselves for these. Fortunately, she’s got a website, which is down due to it being so popular. There you can grab a built-it-yourself kit.