The golden age of the mobile phone preserved in a new museum

Benwood worked in Vodafone’s premium rate phone line division in the mid-1990s when the mobile phone market suddenly took off.

Over the course of a decade, cell phones have evolved from car battery-sized technology to the mainstream “candy bar” style model.

Wood saved every development and recovered the old cell phone from Vodafone Skip. Almost thirty years later, he has accumulated a collection of 3,255 models covering the “golden age” of cell phones. “It’s a little more than what I have at home and kept from my wife,” he admitted.

He’s now working with other collectors to launch the world’s first major mobile phone museum this week, funded through a five-year sponsorship deal with Vodafone.

Launched in November as a vast online archive, the museum tells the story of the world’s most prolific consumer device, with 1.5 billion smartphones sold last year alone.

The Mobile Phone Museum, organized as a charity, will be a traveling exhibition that will be presented in museums and science and design schools in the years to come.

Introducing popular mobile phones before the iPhone era. Phones such as the Nokia 3310 “Beetle” which delivered a staggering 126m device and brought the Snake game to the world. According to Wood, the trendy pink Motorola Razr (the best-selling phone in Carphone Warehouse history) and the full-keyboard BlackBerry model offer nostalgic success in the age of personal communication. To do.

The museum is rich in culture, with Gordon Gekko’s iconic Wall Street Motorola DynaTAC 8000x and the Nokia 8110 “Banana” phone, which won the cult motto for use in the movie The Matrix. Some cell phones influenced him. matrix. There are also scalable dead ends such as the collection of the ugliest forgotten phones, including the Nokia 3650 with a rotary phone-style circular keypad that makes texting impossible, and the Siemens Xelibri fashion series. Some of them are based on those of alien inspiration. design.

Wood, 48, spent a blockade scouring eBay for a rare model after people were “scared” to clean the attic and toss old cell phones in the trash.

He is now a communications analyst at research firm CCS Insight, claiming that the glorious era of the innovative mobile industry is a thing of the past, and that the “sea of ​​identity” (tactile rectangle) characterizes the industry. . I did. “As soon as Steve Jobs took the iPhone out of his pocket on stage on January 9, 2007, it was all over,” he said.

Nonetheless, he argued that the museum relics show “no complacency” for companies like Apple and Samsung in markets where innovations like foldable screens are starting to emerge. ..