I've published two short gizmo reviews in the International Herald Tribune in recent months. Well, they're more product notices than reviews. I'd point you to the URLs, but the IHT search function is a little dotty today. Here's one of the reviews, before minor trims and copy edits:
Spark Fun Portable Rotary Phone
The latest cellphone from Spark Fun Electronics does not feature MPEG-4 video playback. It does not have a VGA camera with digital zoom, nor Bluetooth wireless capability. It does not have even one color display, let alone two, and it is not sheathed in anodized aluminum. If you want those features, you'll have to buy a Motorola RAZR V3 cellphone.
What the Spark Fun Portable Rotary Phone has is heft. Lots of heft. About two pounds of it, against the RAZR's 3.26 ounces. The Spark Fun also has a rotary dial, a thick black plastic casing and a coiled cord, all of which the RAZR lacks. And while the RAZR may have a certain bling factor, the Spark Fun has a ring factor -- as in clanging metal bells, for those tired of the "Crazy Frog Axel F" ringtone.
Spark Fun, a Colorado company founded in 2002 by some college students, takes old-style rotary phones and retrofits them with a custom-made circuit board, an off-the-shelf but expensive cellular module and a hand-built ringer circuit to bring 1950s technology gasping and wheezing into the 21st century. To make the phone go, all you have to do is insert the SIM chip from your overcomplicated, delicate, fly-weight, easy-to-lose cellphone. Spark Fun says the Portable Rotary will work with 90 percent of the world's cellular systems.
Spark Fun (at www.sparkfun.com) sells its phone for just $399, a bargain compared to the RAZR's list price of $599. And when you consider the price per pound, the Portable Rotary Phone's cost advantage becomes even more obvious.
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