The smartphone changed the world, but it wasn’t all for the better. Mobile devices are packed full of endless productivity-killing distractions, and the ability to actually make a phone call almost seems like an afterthought now. A frustrated Justine Haupt came up with an unorthodox solution: she designed and built a mobile phone with a rotary dial that looks like it’s 40 years old.
There’s an entire generation that probably won’t be able to make sense of Haupt’s Rotary Cellphone or why it has a bizarre circular wheel affixed to the top. For the rest of us who suffered through a time when placing calls meant spinning a plastic wheel, Haupt’s creation seems like it was brought to Earth from a parallel dimension where mobile phones took an entirely different evolutionary route, and where technologies like touchscreens never came to fruition.
