A few years ago Justine Haupt combined classic phone design and modern tech to create a working cellphone with a rotary dial. Later she began selling kits to folks who wanted to make their own. Soon a version aimed at folks who aren’t hardware hackers will ship, and a video shows how the new Rotary Un-Smartphone works.

In other recent tech news from around the web, Google has scheduled an October 6th event where the company is expected to officially unveil the Google Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, and Pixel Watch. Microsoft has released a new version of PowerToys that brings three new utilities to Windows PCs. The developers of the open source, Linux-based OpenWrt software for routers and other networking gear have released a major update. And a new cheaper Chromecast with Google TV could be coming soon.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for way to kill time the next time you’re waiting for a large file to finish copying, a new game is designed to run inside the Windows copy dialog.

Keep up on the latest headlines by following Liliputing on Twitter and Facebook and follow @LinuxSmartphone on Twitter and Facebook for the latest news on open source mobile phones.

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  1. From 1963-65 I was part of a small team (at Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ) that designed and built a cordless phone with a dial. The reason for the dial was that we could not get reliable small touchtone keypads from Western Electric (WE) at that time. About 50 phones were built in the WE model shops, and they went into trial in Boston and Phoenix. We used frequencies at 35 and 43 Mhz for full duplex. The phone looked like the models you could start to buy in 1985.

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  3. The ruler feature in PowerToys seems useful. Sometimes when I’m doing CSS work, it would be nice to have a pixel ruler.

    However, I’ve uninstalled PowerToys because it has had an awful bug for several versions now. It will randomly disable part of my keyboard (the number row), and the only fix is shutting down PowerToys. They’ve gone through a few updates with no fix.

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  5. I’d be interested in the rotary phone if it had the ability to be used as a wi-fi hotspot. But mostly as a fallback item should all humanity-respecting smartphones quit working as a socially acceptable communications device, and in that case, I’d expect it to fall out of acceptability first.

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    1. and wifi password input from rotary wheel 😉
      32 char with number, diacratic and shift big char ;D

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