New (LTE) Rotary Cell Phone

[Bill Joyce]

 The video is just under 7 minutes long.  For those who want to really go old school.

[RV_]

Thanks for sharing Bill! This is interesting for any travel or RV emergency phone because it is supposed to have better reception and the mic can be physically shut off for real privacy and no cameras.

Excerpt from the order site:

"Q: In what ways is it a more functional telephone than a smartphone?

A:

• Better reception because the antennas aren't packed against the electronics.
• You don't have to navigate an operating system to get to the phone "application".
• You can assign two buttons to be hard-coded for quick dialing your favorite people. Your spouse, parent, or child can be a single button-press away.
• The point of the phone isn't to use the rotary dial every time you call someone, which would get tiresome fast. You can store your contacts list and then dial up your friends with just two spins of the dial. When the less frequent need to dial a new number arises, the novelty of the satisfying-to-use rotary dial is fun rather than annoying.
• Previously, phones with physical keys required a clamshell (flip) form-factor to prevent unintended dialing. Rotary dials are naturally resistant to butt dialing.
• Nearly instantaneous 10-segment display of signal strength or battery level. Compare to typical 4-bar signal meters.
• The rear ePaper display (for displaying contacts) is bistatic, meaning it doesn't take any energy to display a fixed message.
• The power switch is an actual slide switch. No holding down a stupid button to make it turn off and not being sure it really is turning off or what.
• Physical cut-off switch for the microphone. Thank you Edward Snowden."

https://skysedge.com/unsmartphones/RUSP/index.html

[Lou Schneider]

When Verizon stopped maintaining their wired network infrastructure shortly before Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast and destroyed the wired infrastructure they came out with a small base station to let hardwired phones use a cellular connection.  Rather than repair the damaged landlines they just gave these to their residential customers.

It sat on the counter like an old Hayes Smartmodem, had an RJ-11 jack you plugged your phone into and provided a user experience just like being connected to a landline. You got a dial tone when you lifted the receiver and used the normal touchtone keypad on the phone.   It ran off of a wall wart and you could install a regular 9 volt battery for backup if the power grid went down.  Since it pre-dated VOIP it used the analog cell network just like any other cell phone.  In California Walmart sold them for $40 and I bought a half dozen to use with the dialup security and backup remote control systems at our mountaintop transmitter sites.

Edited September 16, 2022 by Lou Schneider