The Mobile Industry Awards 2022 (opens in new tab) (MIAs) will celebrate the people, organizations and innovations that have made it another memorable year for the world of mobility. It’s also the twentieth anniversary of the event and it’s fair to say that a lot has changed since 2002.
In the last two decades, the mobile phone has transformed from a device that can make calls, send text messages and play snake to pocket-sized computers that are indispensable companions for everyday life.
But the history of cell phones goes back much further – the first cell phone call was made in 1985 and the first SMS text message was sent in 1992. With this approaching British industry’s fortieth birthday, much equipment has been manufactured, bought and abandoned.
The Cell Phone Museum
Technology is characterized by constant change and it is only natural that consumers are drawn to the latest and flashiest products on the shelves. Devices that are considered obsolete are often shelved, gather dust and never considered again.
But as the mobile industry matures, its legacy becomes more important. The mobile phone is the world’s most widespread category of consumer electronics and includes the camera, camcorder, voice recorder, music player, flashlight, compass, wallet, clock, calculator, alarm clock and, for some people, arguably the personal computer.
This development did not just happen overnight. There is a long history of innovation in feature sets and design worth documenting and preserving – and this is where the Cell Phone Museum comes in.
Founder and co-curator Ben Wood has been in the industry since a stint at Vodafone in the 1990’s and is currently an Analyst for CCS Insight. His first cell phone was the Nokia 2110, famous for introducing the soft key, the first entry in a significant collection.
Wood, who believed cell phones were important symbols of social history that needed to be saved. He first amassed a significant personal collection – investing a great deal of time and money in places like eBay – before deciding to take the next step by opening the museum.
“I teamed up with Matt Chatterley (a long-time industry friend and Director of Devices at BT), who had a great collection, and then Kamil Vacek, a philanthropist from the Czech Republic,” says Wood Tech Radar Pro. “He had the website built and then we arranged a five-year deal with Vodafone, which will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first mobile call on their network in 2025. It was all very random.”
This association not only gave Wood more resources to purchase new equipment, but also resulted in significant publicity for the project. When the Mobile Phone Museum launched a physical event in London last November, it had 2,000 unique devices in its collection, a number that has risen to 2,471 at the time of writing, with 250 people donating. In total, the museum has more than 5,000 devices if duplicates are taken into account.
“There’s no ambition to have every phone in the world — that’s ridiculous,” he says. “There must have been tens of thousands of phones made… But I honestly think it’s the largest collection of cell phones in the world.
“I think it’s a realistic expectation that within the next six months we could have 3,000 unique devices where we might have a shot at being in the Guinness Book of World Records.
In search of the Holy Grail
The museum has equipment from around the world, including Europe, North America and Asia, but admits things are a little “GSM-centric” at the moment, which is perhaps unsurprising given its origins are rooted in personal collections that mostly accumulated in Europe. Wood would like to further globalize the collection and acquire more cellphones from countries like Japan and South Korea, which in the mid-2000s often had very different cellphones to the rest of the world.
The fact that so many people are willing to entrust the museum with the occasional very valuable or rare artifact is a testament to the vision of Wood and his co-curators. The museum currently has a “Most Wanted” list of rare phones to add to its collection, like the Pepsi P1 or the modular Google Project Ara, and since its launch it’s managed to get its hands on some of the most desirable .
These include the Motorola Aura Diamond – a diamond-encrusted cellphone that was released in 2009 and cost more than $5,500 at the time.
“The fact that someone has so much faith in the project gives me a warm feeling in my heart,” says Wood. “They know this is a valuable piece of equipment, and they know we’re protecting it.
“Another ‘holy grail’ was the Nokia N950, a product that never really made it to market.”
Ultimate Ambition
Wood’s interest is clearly devices from the “golden era” from 1985 to 2007, in which there was a wide variety of form factors and gimmicks. Although he fully appreciates the possibilities of modern smartphones, he laments the lack of willingness to experiment.
“The moment Steve Jobs walked on stage and pulled the iPhone out of his pocket, it got a little boring,” he says, nothing that most modern cell phones have subscribed to the same design principles.
“However, there are some glimmers of hope for foldables, which will bring a little more design variety to mobile phones.”
It should be easier to get more modern devices, and Woods has touted a model whereby manufacturers make a donation each time they produce a new device, much like an author would give a copy of his book to the British Library after publication provides. However, as the collection is not intended to be exhaustive, he believes some selectivity is required and only the most iconic and important devices are allowed.
The museum is currently online-only, in part because it makes the most of the organization’s resources, but also because it increases accessibility, as anyone around the world can stray through its pages down rabbit holes of exploration. However, there is still work to be done to digitize the collection and create entries for everything in the catalogue.
“Of the 2,471 phones in our collection, only 550 have photos,” explains Wood. “It costs around £30 to professionally photograph each phone. It’s expensive, but it means we often have better pictures of the devices than when they first came out! I wish we could raise the money for all of our devices.”
Wood believes the online model works, but concedes that the ultimate goal is to have a physical exhibition at a “landmark location” like the Design Museum, the Science Museum, in time for the fortieth anniversary of the first phone call in 2025 or to have the Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum.
The next event on the calendar is this week’s 2022 MIAs in London, inviting guests to donate or recycle their old devices.
“This could be the event that will take our collection to over 2,500,” suggests Wood.
Also important is the educational element of the project, with the museum going into schools to inspire future engineers and designers and to illustrate the positive elements of mobility amid broader safety, bullying and cybersecurity concerns.
“The mobile phone is the world’s most productive consumer device, and it’s now increasingly becoming a nostalgic item,” he says.
“Phones sometimes get a bad rap, but we can come in and talk about the incredible history of design and technology and how the UK was a pioneer in this area. It’s pretty exciting to explain to people why cell phones are a force for good.
