I'm here at the launch of the Mobile Phone Museum in London
a collection of more than 2,000 unique mobile phones
from history and I'm here with the curator Ben Wood.
You're going to take me down a little trip on memory lane.
I'd love to show you all 2,120 phones.
But what we're going to do today is pick a few out
and we've got some collections that we curated for the museum tonight.
The first one is what we consider one of the ugliest phones.
Whoever designed this will be upset.
Oh, not this.
I think I knew people at school who had this and it looks very cool
but it's just totally impractical to text on.
So this is the Nokia 7600.
It was Nokia's first commercial 3G phone
and as you said it was at the time when texting was very popular.
I guess there was an idea that you could text using your thumbs
down the sides but it was counter-intuitive.
But look at it. It's not really a thing of beauty.
Two other phones in the ugly collection
include the NTT Personal, which won a design award back in 1995
but due to its shape is now known as the toilet seat phone.
This is the I-Kids SF from 2006
which has rabbit ears to make it appeal to children.
Oh... wait. Is this... is this from Tomorrow Never Dies? It is.
I love this. And this must open up...
I remember this. You can drag your finger across and drive the car.
Also, we have the fingerprint scanner here.
So you may remember in the film that was done.
And also there was a magical screwdriver that you could use to open a safe.
Does it also do "recall, three, send"?
The pièce de résistance, which is very difficult to make in a model.
The taser.
Other movie phones in the collection include the Nokia 8110 banana phone
from the Matrix - Nokia's first slider phone.
The version in the movie was spring-loaded but
the real one you had to open by hand.
This white Sony Ericsson is another Bond phone.
This one was owned by Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale.
I want to show you a phone, which was the phone
that the first mobile phone call in the UK was made on.
This is the Vodafone VT1.
A phone call was made on 1 January 1985.
The numbers are on here... and then...
Hello!
Just check out the weight.
Oh, wow. And where do I put the apps?
You might struggle with the apps on that one.
This was my favourite category
because there were so many world firsts like the IBM Simon
blending computer-style features with a phone.
It is widely considered one of the first smartphones of a sort
although it wasn't branded as one in 1993.
Sharp's J-Phone from the year 2000
is considered by the museum to be the first full camera phone.
Terribly low resolution by today's standards
but it sold out in two weeks in Japan.
It had a mirror on the back for taking selfies.
The first Android looked very different from today's phones
with a full physical keyboard.
But in many ways the first iPhone doesn't look that different
from today's devices.
This was the first pocketable phone from 1986
at a time when mobiles were typically still bricks.
Its designer Nils Martensson was one of the special guests I met at the museum.
We had commissioned Stanford Research in America to forecast
how many cellular telephones there would be in America in year 2000
and they came back with the expensive report and said we think
that there may be as many as 30,000 in America by the year 2000.
I think had they said 30 million they would had been a little
off the mark even with that figure!
Let's go into the world of luxury. This is the XOR phone.
The challenge I have for you is you've got to open it.
I'm guessing it's to do with these... are these buttons? They are.
Hey!
And here it is.
This is a £4,000 luxury phone with ruby crystals in here,
sapphire crystal glass, beautifully polished titanium.
Does it do anything fancy?
The joy of this phone
for the target market is the fact that it does not do anything fancy.
No camera.
Celebrities and high net-worth individuals hate camera phones.
Everyone's going to know this one. We're on best sellers.
Will it be the 3310? Let's see.
There it is. Old and trusty. Hardy 3310.
Controversial, I actually think the 3210 looks better.
That's the one I had. I never upgraded because I thought the other one...
this looked cheaper somehow?
But a phenomenal commercial success.
126 million phones sold - the equivalent of the Japanese population.
Every single person would have one. It's iconic.
And you know what, it's the one phone
when I've taken the museum and showed people, everyone knows the 3310.
The Mobile Phone Museum at the moment is only online.
What's the goal with this long term?
So the museum project was conceived during the pandemic
and museums were a broken business case at that point.
So we thought the best thing to do was go with a virtual museum online.
Instant global audience, crowd source some of the exhibits
so we're getting help from the public
to get those most-wanted finds that we want to get.
In 2025, it will be 40 years
since the first mobile phone call was made in the UK
and my hope is that we can put on a big exhibition at somewhere
like Science Museum or Design Museum or V&A and actually open the doors
and let the public come and see this amazing collection.