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Rotary Un-Smartphone Kit
- mothsonasloth 4y agoI always fancied making an old TV or Radio dial with some preset channels that my grandmother could use to view news or see funny youtube videos, rather than use a keyboard. I might have a hack now after seeing this.
- SamBam 4y agoThis looks lovely. Pocket-sized? Perhaps with big pockets. But certainly it can be thrown in a bag without worrying that it's taking up space.
- nickt 4y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20220426115020/https://skysedge.com/unsmartphones/RUSP/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220426115020/https://skysedge....
- _joel 4y agoStill has the baseband in it though, right, or am I missing something?
- wffurr 4y agoWell yeah. Usually the "smart" in smartphone refers to the application processor and user facing OS. I don't think you can connect to an LTE network without a baseband processor. If your threat model includes the firmware on the baseband processor, best not to use a smartphone at all. Or leave your cave in the mountains of Pakistan.
- _joel 4y agoTrue, just wondering...
- krisoft 4y agoYou are right it does have a baseband processor. It is using a uBlox TOBY-R20[02] chip to act as one. That runs some proprietary code written by who knows who and it can act against your interest. There are some mitigations in place: They claim to have a physical cut-off switch for the microphone. They also say that the power switch is an actual slide switch. If these are correctly implemented you can be certain when is the phone able to listen to you, and when is it properly off. Also it is much more likely that the AtMega2560 acting as the application processor is properly isolated from the baseband processor. (If for no other reason that the developers would have to go out of their way to program/wire it in such a manner to be half as vulnerable as most other phone's application processors are.) That being said the text of the product page focuses on the usability of the phone not on the privacy or security aspects. Out of the 9 positives they list, only 1 talks about privacy/security. This would indicate the focus of the people who built it. Just to be clear on this: There is nothing wrong with focusing on UX. Not every product has to be laser focused on privacy/security. It is clearly made by a small team. (Perhaps only by a single person?) They wanted to make a phone which causes less distractions to the phone's users. All the power to them.
- durgampudi 4y ago
- durgampudi 4y ago
- durgampudi 4y ago
- toper-centage 4y agoHonestly some great ideas (better antenna, e-ink display for basic SMSing, quick dial, probably huge battery life), but they can't be serious about the rotary dial. > Previously, phones with physical keys required a clamshell (flip) form-factor to prevent unintended dialing. Rotary dials are naturally resistant to butt dialing. You can solve butt dialing with a number of ways, like another hardware switch. This solution seems much more cumbersome, and I can't believe this is not done simply out of novelty.
- throwaway4aday 4y agoFrom my perspective it's a feature, if I were to switch to a phone like this it would be because I wanted my phone to only do one thing handle important communication. No apps, no internet, no texting, phone calls only. That said, I could see having both a regular smartphone and a phone like this. In that case I would treat this phone as a private line only given out to a small number of people. That would allow me to leave my regular smartphone off or at home if I felt like disconnecting for a while but I would still be reachable by phone call through a distraction free device.
- enriquto 4y agoAs I see it, the rotary dial is the main feature, the rest are just nice things to have (that you can get elsewhere from many dumb phones). It's an extremely cool project and I can't wait to get one!
- recuter 4y agoYou know you can just get a vintage one for a song, real beauties, heavy enough to clobber a would be assassin. https://www.ebay.com/sch/182098/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=rotary+phone https://www.ebay.com/sch/182098/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=rotary...
- kwhitefoot 4y agoWeight is helpful not only for fighting off assassins. A dial telephone needs to be heavy with good non-slip feet or you have to hold it down while dialling. The UK Trimphone weighed 800 g and people complained that dialling with it was difficult.
- schwartzworld 4y agoIs there a term for faux retro products? Modern tech used to emulate past hardware?
- mwexler 4y agoIt's like skeuomorphism, a bit... Wikipedia summarizes the big pieces at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph
- ChrisClark 4y agoMaybe we need a new word, anachromorphism.
- mxuribe 4y agoI was about to reply "steampunk"...but, no, that's not the right term either. Now, i'm curious myself.
- unclewalter 4y agoThe term I'm thinking is "pastiche". I usually apply it to "Disney World" type of items or places that try and recreate the feel of a different time. Some "speakeasy" bars fall in to that category.
- Kaibeezy 4y agoFor me, a minimalist alternative phone would need to be able to hotspot a more flexible device (tablet, laptop) for when other tasks are required. Else, I’d need a second mobile account.
- simoneau 4y ago"So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%." https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv-bloatware-and-the-8020-myth/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
- monsieurbanana 4y agoI'm too young to really remember how it was in 2001, so all I can say is that the article has at the very least aged poorly. Hide your kids, check under the bed, in the closet, because bloatware is real and it's coming for you. No thanks Microsoft, I really don't need ads in my task bar.
- spockz 4y agoRecently call quality on our normal mobile phone connections have severely degraded. (At least in the places I visit in NL and especially while in a moving vehicle.) I switched to using FaceTime audio and with the noise cancellation the audio quality is superb and I would t want to go back. So although I would love to use a minimal phone like this I would want to keep all the benefits of modern day audio connections.
- dleslie 4y agoIt's shocking to me how terrible regular cellular call quality is, when on the same network and device I access superior quality through WhatsApp.
- spockz 4y agoStrangely it isn’t always like this. Years ago I called a colleague on his private number and somehow we had an extremely clear connection. Why doesn’t Apple make its voice isolation available in the phone dialer as well?
- Handytinge 4y agoA significant quality difference is the codec. POTS calls are generally in some leg analog, meaning they scale down to about 8kbit. VoIP options have wider band codecs like G722 and Opus, allowing for 128kbit+.
- dotancohen 4y agoI would use this as my daily-driver phone if it were to enable a Wifi hotspot so that my smart device - in the other pocket - could access e.g. Telegram.
- rileyphone 4y agoGiven that the site is down and this is hn, I’ll just add that I’ve been planning to make something like this with an old 302 rotary, pulse to tone converter, pap2t, asterisk, and a program yet to be made that hooks it all up as a mic/headset for a computer.
- wazoox 4y agoRidiculous, and necessary :)
- Sporktacular 4y agoA USD390 conversation piece for hipsters.
- bolingo007 4y agoJust try
- pipeline_peak 4y agoIt would be better if it worked with your phone calls through Bluetooth, implying it would actually be compatible this way. It’s cool, but idk anyone who just has Spare SIM cards.
- ValtteriL 4y agoWith a physical alarm bell and everything! Unfortunately having smartphone is kinda mandatory around here for internet banking and commute tickets. Signal is also important for me personally.
- mplanchard 4y agoI’d love something like this that I could just dock my phone into when I get home, rather than needing a separate SIM. Especially if it had a nice receiver. Trying to actually talk on a cell phone is so much harder than it used to be when you could cradle the receiver in your shoulder.
- 300bps 4y agoTrying to actually talk on a cell phone is so much harder than it used to be when you could cradle the receiver in your shoulder. If this was tongue-in-cheek, you got me! I would never go back to holding a physical phone up to my ear after using wireless airpods or equivalent.
- mplanchard 4y agoHa! I feel you, but it’s not tongue in cheek. I almost never use earbuds, and I hate holding my featureless glass slab up to my ear for extended periods. I long for the days of sitting with something actually designed to be held to my ear. Edit: it’s also part of a general desire to be more untethered from the phone. I wish I could have a classic phone + ringer experience that integrates with my smart phone, so I can just plug the phone in and forget about it once I’m home unless I get a call (for whatever reason my phone’s ringer is not loud enough to be heard throughout the house, and I feel like having something to dock it to would make it easier psychologically to not feel like I have to carry it around with me all the time).
- steanne 4y agothat exists. here's one, probably not the only. https://www.phonelabs.com/prd05.asp https://www.phonelabs.com/prd05.asp
- omoikane 4y agoThis feels like exactly the kind of toy a person would buy if they want to annoy all their office mates. I wonder if there is a vibrate mode?
- sandworm101 4y agoIs it a rotary phone or a touchscreen app underneath a rotary? I cannot tell from the pictures. For 400$ I would rather have a dongle/cord/app that would allow me to plug an actual oldschool phone into my cellphone.
- mmazing 4y agoI'm interested in the LED choices (listed as incandescent-like) - what type of LED can I look for with my own personal projects to achieve this?
- walrus01 4y agofor people who want to do something like this, not a cellphone but an actual desk phone, you can do it a lot cheaper if you want a rotary phone connected to modern phone networks. there's various oldschool bell system type desk rotary phones on ebay for $35-60 and then add a pulse dial/rotary compatible ATA ($25-55) to speak SIP to asterisk or other standards-compliant voip systems. typically this will have a 100BaseTX ethernet interface. the rest is just ordinary voip phone setup, assuming you have an asterisk or similar system to talk to, main limitation is the rotary phone obviously can't send DTMF tones. http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=20386.0 http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=203... https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=pulse+dial+SIP+ATA https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=pulse+d...
- pabs3 4y agoHmm, that "open source" license doesn't seem to be compliant with the Open Source Definition. https://skysedge.com/opensource/ https://skysedge.com/opensource/ https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd