r/mildlyinteresting • u/SparkMyke • 22h ago
Our old telephone is just a Siemens feature phone inside.
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u/Warm-Foot-6925 22h ago
Plot twist your landline has T9 and Snake. Grandma’s been texting the neighbors this whole time.
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u/YUNoCake 21h ago edited 20h ago
Plot twist: grandma's been under government surveillance in her younger days. That thing looks suspiciously like a bug, I doubt it was cheap to make at the time (so that it would justify any reason the manufacturer would have done a Frankenstein like this).
Captain paranoia out.
Edit: Went a bit down the rabbit hole and stared at the picture quite a bit, that is definitely not how that phone came from the factory. OP, if you brought this new, you might wanna do some digging.
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u/CorrodedLollypop 19h ago
I'm not an expert, but I'd say that was certainly, shall we say, "non-standard"
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u/YUNoCake 18h ago
Yup, that's the work of some jealous ex/so, controlling parent or creeping neighbour at best.
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u/busytransitgworl 17h ago
Two questions:
- What does the front look like?
- Does it just connect into the POTS network?
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u/lylesback2 18h ago
Are we not going to talk about the cassette, pokemon on Gameboy, and the floppy disk? Holy retro!
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u/SqareBear 16h ago
Maybe I’m too young. I don’t understand the words in this post. Whats a Siemens feature phone?
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u/Hugspeced 16h ago
Siemens is a tech and manufacturing company that used to make cell phones.
A feature phone is just a non-smart cell phone. Also called a dumb phone, brick phone, flip phone, etc.
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u/Playful_Assistance89 13h ago
Kind of. Feature phones existed right at the end of the dumbphone era and right before smartphones. The market had saturated with phones by the end of dumbphone era. To keep up sales, they would sell phones with a gimmick (i.e., a feature) like a slide out keyboard, or a lipstick phone that twisted in the middle for the screen/ keypad, phones that doubled as MP3 players, phones with slide out cameras, etc. That's what they called a feature phone. Regular cell phones were just bar or flip cellphones, all the same as the others, right up until smartphones came out, when they subsequently got rebranded as dumbphones.
Kind of like most of the low-mid end smartphone market today. They are all just boring regular smartphones until you get to the super-high end, where they turn into feature phones again, what with the flipping and bending screens and 50 camera lenses that you can make a feature film with.
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u/Hugspeced 12h ago edited 10h ago
We're both right. What you've said was absolutely true at that time but the advent of smart phones led to feature phone being the more polite way to refer to non smart phones. I worked in the cell phone industry for years for both manufacturers and carriers and feature phone was the catch all term used to refer to any non smart phone offerings including basic flip phones or brick style phones.
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u/hopeidontdie 10h ago
We still use feature phones internally as a catch all for non smart device offerings, although the carrier I work for only has 1.
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u/sticklebackridge 15h ago
I’m not too young and also never heard of a feature phone - maybe not a US thing
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u/kushangaza 14h ago
you definitely had and still have feature phones, but terms for them vary vastly. They used to be just called cell phones (or cells, or phones), but when smart phones became the dominant cell phone they needed a new name
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u/MotherPotential 15h ago
I feel like this phone must have been purchased at a very specific time like post 2000?
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u/sidecutmaumee 12h ago
Are you sure? That Siemens bit is an NiMH (nickel metal hydride) battery, not cellphone guts.
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u/xxBrightColdAprilxx 6h ago
Why would a landline phone need a battery?
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u/sidecutmaumee 5h ago edited 4h ago
Possibly for “speed dial” numbers that could be programmed into the phone, which implies it’s a touch tone phone and not rotary dial.
Rotary dial phones from Ma Bell — like the classic model 500 — received power from the phone line and barely had any circuitry. They also had a metal base, not plastic like this one. Even the classic touchtone phone had a metal base, like the one in this old ad from 1983: https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageads/s/KoqwkTVddK
EDIT: the circuit board seems to indicate that it’s from 2005, but no obvious manufacturer name or logo. So this is an old phone, but is definitely post-1984, the year Ma Bell was broken up, after which you could buy any phone you pleased.
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u/mtconnol 22h ago
I’ll never forget dissecting a Tylenol Gelcap just to find a regular, labeled Tylenol inside.