What phones are going to become collectible?

[Sad, little man]

I've started to realize, based on the fact that nearly any phone made within the last several years has enough processing power for most peoples' needs, at least within the current frame of reference for what we expect phones to do, isn't there becoming a time when certain phones may become collectible for a lot of people? Or, being that production numbers are usually so high, at least sought after or desired, if not actually scarce?

To illustrate what I'm talking about, I'm still loving my Galaxy Note Edge, going on three years since it's been released. After my old one got stolen, I went to great lengths to scrounge up another new one. (All the used ones I found for sale were crappily refurbished. Phones don't seem to come onto the used market in very good condition.) It's an oddball in that, AFAIK, it was the only "edge" phone from Samsung to only have the edge screen on one side of the phone. And in a way, it was even more interesting and radical than later edge phones. I've compared it side by side with later models with curves on both sides of the screen, and they actually don't wrap around the side of the phone to quite the degree that the screen on the Note Edge did. It also had a lot of weird stuff going on in the edge screen that I don't think ever got duplicated on later phones.

I wanted to get a waterproof phone to use when kayaking. Of course I didn't want to drop big money on a new phone, so I found an S4 Active. I'm a big fan of the fact that it's both waterproof and retains a removable back cover and swappable battery. I kind of thought the two of those things were mutually exclusive to one another. Then I realized that Samsung did do it with the S4 and S5 active, before they went all-in on phones with non-removable batteries.

A friend of mine at work used to swear by his old Samsung Alias phone. He didn't need a smartphone, and it had a really slick feature where each key on the keypad was its own little e-ink display. And the phone had a funky hinge where you could open it like a flip phone, and the keys would look like a normal phone, but open it like a clamshell, and the keys transformed into a qwerty keyboard for messaging. It was admittedly pretty cool and unique.

[dodint]

They're appliances, they'll become collectible in the same way a coffee maker does.

[Kchrpm]

I still have my Sony Ericsson S710a, my first phone with a good camera as well as having a very unique design. The big screen and customizable UI was icing on the cake.

[dodint]

I have a drawer full of old phones. They find occasional uses, like acting as an iRacing HUD.

15 years ago there were people still holding onto their StarTACs. It happens.

[Yw-slayer]

Some might become collectibles. Most won't.

[Sad, little man]

They're appliances, they'll become collectible in the same way a coffee maker does.
So is your M6.

[Sad, little man]

Some might become collectibles. Most won't.
I agree. But under that "some might" I think there's space there for certain landmark phones to be revered and looked up to. I'd argue that the Nokia 3310 and the original Moto Razr have achieved this.

And maybe in the short term, some may be held onto and used for their features, before technology moves so far that they're just plain inadequate for daily use.

[thesameguy]

Everything is collectible - my girlfriend's mom has a collection of '90s Popples - but I think you mean valuable. There are very few examples of valuable old technology. The first Apple II, the first Mac... I can't actually think of anything else. Maybe the first HP calculator? Nobody wants the first TI graphing calculator, the first Dell System 100, the first Casio digital watch. Highly unlikely anything as trivial as a middle age tablet or cell phone is going to be worth anything. Nothing groundbreaking there, they're just evolutionary products.

[dodint]

I'd still pay some nice coin for an Atari 2600 Heavy Sixer.

[thesameguy]

You can get them on ebay for $100 or so - more or less depending on condition & accessories. Was just pricing old consoles as the girlfriend's mom has both a 2600 and a Colecovision in the garage and we were seeing if it was worth it to sell them. It's not.

Great example - this is a highly collectible electronic that's worth very little.... and at least you can still use an Atari... a RAZR or 3300 is pretty much useless.

[dodint]

What's your standard of value, though?

A $100 Heavy Sixer (fair price based on completed eBay auctions) is a 5-10x premium over the much more common four switch.

I agree with you entirely that phones are worthless. Just as an aside I don't think it's fair to say that something isn't valuable because the absolute value of $100 isn't important to you personally. It lacks context.

[Kchrpm]

Should the standard of value be tied to the original price? Perhaps if it maintains value equivalent to some percentage of its original price, adjusted for inflation, after a couple decades?

Perhaps the whole thing is too niche and nebulous to make any rules for.

[thesameguy]

Just as an aside I don't think it's fair to say that something isn't valuable because the absolute value of $100 isn't important to you personally. It lacks context.

If someone were to walk up to me and say "I will give you $100 for that Atari" and then disappear, that would absolutely be worth consideration. That would be defensibly valuable. But, if getting that $100 means evaluating condition, creating a listing on ebay, paying a $10 ebay fee, $15 to ship it, taking my time packing it up and putting it on a truck, and then having to deal with post-sale support, complaints, or regrets that's a whole different ball of wax. One scenario is $100 for a minute of my time, and I don't make $600 an hour. The other scenario is $75 and at least a half hour of my time, plus the unknowable future time cost. Heaven forbid it get lost or damaged in transit. I'm assuming you have packing materials and an existing scheduled carrier pickup - but I think most people would be paying for that, too. I'm sure this doesn't apply to everyone, but I think generally people would agree that's not a major financial win and it's at best an annoying use of time. The actual in your pocket profit is a nice dinner, not paying rent.

It's easy to get excited about that gross value of $100, but when you factor in the cost in getting that money and look hard at the net it's not that attractive. I'm not saying it's valueless, only that once you factor in the cost of the sale you're not going to make nearly as much money as it appears.


Should the standard of value be tied to the original price? Perhaps if it maintains value equivalent to some percentage of its original price, adjusted for inflation, after a couple decades?

I think all those metrics are interesting, but value is almost necessarily contemporaneous. It's nice to look at an Atari you bought in 1985 for $50 and then sold for $100 as having doubled your money - hell, it's nice looking at anything you bought for $x and sold for $2x. But, monetary value is tied pretty strictly to "what does this do for me now" because you can't apply money to the past and you can't know the future use for it... all you've got to work with is "what does this cash do for me in this moment?" As the amount goes up, the group of people positively affected gets larger... Nobody is affected by a penny, more people are affected by $1,000, most people are affected by $10,000, and virtually everybody is affected by $1,000,000. I'd submit the $100 range is very interesting, because if you're making minimum wage or in dire straights $100 gets a fair amount done, but at the same time if you're that average person in that average place in your life, $100 is fun but you probably wouldn't try that hard to get it. I mean, my looking into prices was to determine that exact thing - is it worth it to this lady to try and ebay her Colecovision and 2600, or are there other things could do to make that money or save that money with less effort or more reliably? All elements factored in, it's pretty damned close.

[Rare White Ape]

Old products only have value because people project that value on to them, as opposed to a manufacturer making a business decision based on cost and market forces. Old video game consoles, especially BNIB ones, have lots of value because people have fond memories and nostalgia for them. And the well worn out suggestion that someone could just use an emulator simply doesn't wash here; people want the actual thing, to hold it in their hands and play with its buttons and plug it in and play the games from their childhood. Old game consoles might be outdated, but they serve a vastly different purpose to mobile phones.

So which phones could become collectible? Perhaps the old brick phone from the 80's, the classic Motorola with the flip-down mouthpiece, the Nokia 3310 which the cops could use to bust open a doorway, the first iPhone. They're all museum pieces. The Museum of Failure in Sweden has a Nokia N-Gage on display. Imagine having some of those complete with their original boxes; relics from history that probably don't even work on current cell networks.

Then there's this: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/06/samsung-wants-to-sell-refurbished-note-7s-with-the-silliest-possible-name/

An original Note 7 would be a rare find, and so far the refurbished Fandom Edition is only being sold in South Korea. So there's a few more recent examples that have the potential to be collectible. What about an iPhone 4 that was never updated to lose its old skeuomorphic UI?

Who knows? The mobile phone collector's market hasn't exploded yet, so now might be the right time to invest.

[Sad, little man]

I guess "collectable" may have been the wrong word. I think I'm really saying that some phones might just become sought after, perhaps not valuable, but some people still seeking them out. I envision this much in the way that people flock to cars that are a few generations old... They're still modern cars in most respects, but they have a simplicity that makes them appealing, and some features that people like but are being phased out in modern cars. ie, something along the lines of how some people like 10-15 year old cars for their genuine manual transmissions, I like my few generations out of date phone for the removable battery.

[KillerB]

The Apple I goes for close to six figures at auction these days. That's the only thing I can think of.

[Yw-slayer]

OK, well, at the moment I'd say that the following will retain some value and/or be seen as iconic in some way, mainly because of their design but more likely because they represented the state of affairs at that time:

The first Motorola suitcase phone
The first Motorola brick phone
Motorola StarTAC - My friends and I were talking about this the other day. Truly iconic design.
Nokia 8110 or 7110 - Objectively speaking, probably more the former than the latter. I'm biased toward the latter as I have two of them. Somewhere.
Nokia 8810 and/or 8890 - For the bling and high-end materials.
SonyEricsson T28 - Design-wise - I bought one after its prime and, again, it's around somewhere.
Nokia 3210 - Because everyone outside the US had one, and it was the first easily customisable phone, with internal antennae, and T9. I had a hilarious clear case with lights that would light up when a call was being made. It also looked much better than the chubby-ass 3310 which attraction I never understood.
SonyEricsson T68i or T610 - Great phones for their era, but I think the T610 is probably more worthy of inclusion.
Original Blackberry - Keyboard.
Motorola RAZR - As with the StarTAC - one of those friends had one and said this was actually his favourite phone design ever. Although I never owned one primarily due to the weird Motorola UI, I have always wanted one and tend to agree.
Motorola Aura/R1 - For the rotation and the bling.
Nokia N-Gage - Because it's the N-Gage.
HTC Diamond - Probably the best-looking Windows Phone, again I'm biased although I had the Diamond Pro keyboard version.
Original iPhone - It's basically what almost all subsequent phones have looked like and the App Store changed everything for n00bz.
Motorola Droid/Milestone - First truly good Android phone, and had a great keyboard, I'm biased as I had a Milestone, which was great.
HTC One M7 - First truly beautiful Android phone.
Galaxy S6 Edge - First phone with dual-sided curved screens.

And of course, we'd also have to have the original (unrefurbished) Galaxy Note 7.

Some other suggestions here too: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/slideshows/tech-life/check-out-the-most-iconic-mobile-phones-of-the-past/ericsson-t28/slideshow/53795408.cms I agree with the Communicator.

[Rare White Ape]

^ Love that link.

Since my first phone contract, I never had anything but Nokias. Man they had some awesome (and some really bad) futuristic-cum-business designs. Towards the end I had a Nokia N95 in 2008. That thing was cool-as. But... it was one of Nokia's last attempts to hold relevance against the iPhone, and it hurt so much. You could tell that app developers were just not willing to unlock its potential; no native Facebook app was the most egregious of its shortcomings. I had to browse the web using Opera and the chunky d-pad to scroll. Click-click-click... It's Windows companion software was terrible. Yes, I've still got the box for it!

The very next phone I got was an iPhone 4 in 2010, and it's been iPhones ever since for me.

[Yw-slayer]

If I can ever find my 7110s and my T28, as well as a spare battery which WORKS (highly unlikely), it'd be cool to get a burner SIM and (again assuming they still work on today's 4G networks) forward all calls from my Galaxy to them.

Honestly, I wish they'd release an updated T28 or 3210 for basic use, and a RAZR with an updated UI. That would be awesome.

[Dicknose]

No love for the Palm Treo.
One of the first smart phones, it was years before the iPhone. I had GPS and mapping on my phone (ok external Bluetooth gps unit) which was pretty funky back then. Obviously didn't have the good app support that worked for Apple. But it moved their successful pda devices to a phone.

[Yw-slayer]

Ah yes, that was good. I had a Handspring Visor. That was fine, silly name aside. One of my colleagues even had the phone add-on. Oh, how we laughed when he used it.

[Rare White Ape]

This is a very timely video.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5s3AraKZ1E

[Yw-slayer]

I don't have 4:35 to listen to some dude. Fuck people putting up shit on Youtube.

[Rare White Ape]

That channel's videos are actually quite good, some of the better tech reviews I've seen. So… yeah.

Give it a shot. An on-topic look back at the first iPhone will only cost you 4:35 of your life.

[Kchrpm]

How about the first 5-inch smartphone?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Advantage_X7500

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/HTC_Athena.jpg

Also pre-iPhone (but just barely), with GPS, a full-ish browser, apps, expandable storage, media players, etc. I got it because I had been using a Dell PDA and the aforementioned Sony S710 extensively, and it combined the functionality of both. Helped that it was like 40% off at the local CompUSA's liquidation sale.

[dodint]

No.

[Yw-slayer]

That channel's videos are actually quite good, some of the better tech reviews I've seen. So… yeah.

Give it a shot. An on-topic look back at the first iPhone will only cost you 4:35 of your life.

That's 4:35 I could spend watching other, better videos.