You know what it is that makes steampunk so alluring? It is the ’tech’ which we can relate to, expressed in a fantasy sort of way which often features stuff like gears and cogs, and steam power, in place of batteries and microprocessor. I think you get the idea and if you do get the idea, you’d be impressed by this DIY Rotary Cell Phone Prototype put together by YouTube Mr. Volt. Yes, it is a cell phone and yes, it has the good’ol rotary dial that reminiscent of the 1920s landline phone, you know, the actual phone, phone before it got replaced by keypad on the now-nearly obsolete fixed line communication device? Yea. That phone.
Sporting a aluminum, brass, and wood construction, Rotary Cell Phone Prototype by Mr. Volt has a form factor that reminds us of the very old Motorola DynaTAC 8000X AKA ‘water bottle’ cell phone, which means it pretty huge even by today’s standards and wait for this… it is a functional cell phone complete with a tad modern touches like an OLED display and it is totally capable of storing a whopping one phone number.
And there’s more; it can even text too, but I imagine it would be a very tedious process as you literally need to dial in each alphabet to form a word, and it has a FM radio built into it because, we are guessing folks who are accustomed to rotary dial probably still enjoy listening to the good’ol analog FM radio broadcast. Take a look at Mr. Volt’s walk-through of the Rotary Cell Phone Prototype by Mr. Volt in the embedded video below.
Image: screengrab via YouTube video.
Animated GIF via Gizmodo.
