Virtual ‘Mobile Phone Museum’ Launches With Really Weird Phones

I've seen some wild phones in my day. Lipstick phones. Makeup phones. Phones that looked like Shrek. Now all of history's weirdest phones are coming together in the amazing Mobile Phone Museum, a virtual exhibition from a team led by analyst Ben Wood, which presents more than 2,000 phones and many of their stories.

I've been to Verizon's museum and Samsung's museum; what differentiates this site is the presentation. Wood and his non-profit team have lovingly photographed each phone so that you really feel you can see and touch it. This stuff is much better than our product photography from back in the day. While UK-based, the museum has a global library.

There are other websites that have tried to catalog the history of computers and phones. I love oldcomputers.net, and the library on phonearena.com is still eminently searchable. The new museum doesn't appear to have many models after 2013, and as I've reflected on before, most of the phones since then are in a very similar, black slab style.

You're inevitably going to find some phones not represented here. I remember the Firefly, a tiny lozenge for children, or and the horrifying Motorola Backflip with its rear-mounted touch pane, for instance. I think the collection is a bit slanted toward models available in the UK, although it's still accepting donations.

But it's full of rich and weird history; before they were just camera-festooned portals into cloud services, phones used to be more fun. There are several curated collections on the site; the most fun one is “Ugliest Phones,” where you get to read the disastrous story of Sierra Wireless's Voq smartphone, for instance. Some other good stories from the site:

There are other good folks doing great retro phone content, too. I'd point you to Dieter Bohn's new documentary on smartphone innovator Handspring, and YouTuber Michael Fisher's ongoing series of videos where he refurbishes and walks through the history of bizarre, older devices.

What are your favorite phones of history? Tell us in the comments.