Free Shipping Australia Wide ✦ 14-day returns ✦ Bluetooth on every phone & speaker
Free Shipping Australia Wide ✦ 14-day returns ✦ Bluetooth on every phone & speaker
A timeline of retro tech, from the first horn speaker in 1887 to the Bluetooth speakers we know and love today. The radio on the kitchen bench, the landline phone you were glued to in the hallway, the console that ate a whole summer. Some of it you owned. Some of it you just wanted.
Emile Berliner patents the gramophone, and sound stops being something you had to be in the room for. The brass horn becomes the first shape music ever had.
The same brass-horn silhouette, with Bluetooth doing the work the crank used to. It streams whatever you were already listening to.
The Regency TR-1 arrives as the first commercially sold transistor radio. For the first time, music is something you carry rather than something you gather around.
The one that sat on the kitchen windowsill, tuned to the same station for years. Same wood-grain cabinet and brass tuning needle, with Bluetooth underneath for everything you've listened to since.
Announced at the Berlin radio show, it hands ordinary people the ability to record. The mix tape, and the pencil you rewound it with, both start here.
One phone, one spot in the house, and a number you knew by the sound of the dial returning. If you weren't home, you simply missed the call.
Real dial, real handset weight, Bluetooth running quietly underneath. It pairs to your smart phone while it stays out of reach, and then behaves like it's 1968. The in built speaker is just a bonus.
How a mechanical dial became the default way an entire century placed a call, and why the shape outlived the technology inside it.
Longer cords, wall mounts, and a household's entire social life conducted standing up in one spot. The cord got wrapped around a finger and stayed that way.
One phone, one spot in the house, and a cord you wrapped around your finger for the length of the call. Pair it to your mobile via Bluetooth once, and it rings like it always did.
At midnight on 1 March, Australian television finally went to full colour, a decade behind most of the world. Within five years roughly four in five homes had a colour set.
Headphones stop being a studio tool and become a way to be alone in public. The commute is never quite the same again.
On 9 August, the first call was placed on Telecom's automatic mobile network. The handset weighed about 14kg and cost roughly $5,000.
Portable stereo gets loud, heavy, and deliberately visible. Carrying one to the park was the entire point, and so was the shoulder ache afterwards.
A faithful '84 shell with modern Bluetooth inside, so it streams anything you like, in four colours the eighties would have approved of.
Digital audio reaches the living room, and a generation learns to hold a disc by its edges. Nobody explained why. Everyone did it anyway.
Lift-up lid, visible spinning disc, Bluetooth 5.3 for when you'd rather stream. Plays your actual CD collection rather than just referencing it.
Telecom launched the country's first cellular network in February, marked by skydivers landing at the Sydney Opera House. Handsets sold for $4,250.
Released in Japan on 21 April and reaching Australia in 1990, bundled with Tetris. Four AA batteries, no backlight, and a green screen you angled toward the nearest lamp.
A single page at CERN explaining what the World Wide Web was. Thirty-five years later it is the reason most of us want a phone that only rings.
Gaming moves from the bedroom floor to the lounge room, and from cartridges to discs. The loading screen enters Australian life permanently.
The home computer becomes genuinely mainstream, and the modem handshake becomes the most recognisable noise of the decade. (We know you can hear it plain as day right now, too.)
The translucent, coloured all-in-one lands and design becomes something people expect from technology rather than tolerate the absence of. Either you had one, or you wanted one...
Snake, composable ringtones, a battery measured in days, and a reputation for surviving drops that has outlived the phone itself.
A thousand songs and no sleeve notes. The album stops being a physical object, and the shelf it used to sit on starts to empty out.
The touchscreen smartphone absorbs the camera, the Walkman, the console, the map, and the newspaper. Also the interruptions. Especially the interruptions.
DAB+ rolled out across the capital cities from May 2009, adding stations that had never existed on the AM or FM dial. The radio stayed on the bench. What came out of it changed.
A wooden-cased radio with the dial and the fabric grille, tuning to digital stations rather than static. Bluetooth as well, for when the radio isn't what you want.
Millions of accounts came offline, and a national conversation about screen time stopped being a niche concern. Interest in doing less with our devices climbs sharply.
Being deliberate about the technology in your life instead of letting it run on autopilot, and where a phone that only rings fits into that.
A small, curated range of genuinely functional retro phones and speakers, built new and made for Australia. The history above, the nostalgia we all feel looking back on the things we remember so clearly, is exactly why.
No algorithm. Just something worth your time.
