When Christian Simpson, a retro gaming YouTuber often known as Peri Fractic, purchased the stays of an early PC firm known as Commodore in 2025, he determined to select up proper the place the unique Commodore left off. Which meant beginning product growth within the mid-Nineteen Nineties. Simpson and his group first set to work reviving the corporate’s most iconic product, and now you can buy a Commodore 64 that’s the spitting picture of the 1982 unique (apart from the Wi-Fi connectivity, the USB ports, and some different barely fashionable niceties). It’s a pure nostalgia play, and by most accounts an excellent one. Commodore says it has bought 30,000 of them since final yr.
After that, issues started to get hypothetical. The flip of the twenty first century was the start of the cellphone period, when firms like Nokia dominated the technological world. Simpson discovered himself asking: What would Commodore have achieved? Made a telephone, certainly. “I believe they’d have adopted Apple,” Simpson tells me, “and in the end launched an iPhone. Or, at the very least, a telephone. Each different firm did.”
The brand new Commodore is now on the point of ship the telephone the unique Commodore by no means dreamed of. It’s known as the Callback 8020, it’s a flip telephone, and it begins at $499. With options and colours straight out of the early aughts, Simpson appears to hope it could as soon as once more satiate folks’s gadget nostalgia, whereas additionally offering a solution to a really 2026 drawback: We’re all on our telephones an excessive amount of.
It’s not a formidable piece of computing {hardware}, nevertheless it’s probably not making an attempt to be. It has a 3.25-inch, 480 x 640 display on the within, a MediaTek Helio G81 processor, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, a headphone jack, and an FM radio antenna. The retro stylings learn “retro”; the spec sheet reads “in all probability just a little gradual.”
Philosophically, the Callback has quite a bit in frequent with gadgets just like the Mild Cellphone, and tries to strike the identical tough steadiness between giving folks all of the options they want and precisely nothing else. “That is actually the telephone between dumb and good,” Simpson says. It blocks social media and net browsers solely; the telephone isn’t even allowed to entry Fb’s servers. As a result of the system runs a model of Jolla’s privacy-focused Sailfish working system, although, it could technically run nearly any Android app.
Moderately than attempt to guess precisely what customers need, Commodore’s plan is to construct an allow-listing system, by which customers can request to have an Android app added to the Callback’s retailer, and a mixture of AI and human reviewers will determine what’s acceptable. (And, after all, for every little thing else there’s sideloading.) Simpson appears recreation so as to add issues like Uber and Spotify, and is absolutely able to cease time-sucks like Slack and Gmail from ever ending up on a Callback.
Commodore imagines the Callback as a nights-and-weekends telephone for getting away from all of your work apps and notifications. The entire telephone is designed to be quieter: It has 5 coloured LEDs that glow when you will have a notification, slightly than buzzing in your pocket. The telephone’s outer display solely ever exhibits the time, date, battery degree, and connectivity standing. You may take footage with the 48-megapixel digicam, ship messages through voice or old-school T9 typing, hearken to music with the “audiophile-grade” DAC and included headphones, make calls, and never a lot else.
The usual Callback mannequin is available in beige, white, and silver. There’s additionally a really cool translucent blue mannequin for $549.99, and a gold “Founders Version” mannequin for $640. Commodore’s plan is to begin transport the telephones by the tip of this yr, and Simpson appears assured he can get it achieved even with the shrinking provide of RAM and different elements. “We’ve inbuilt a buffer to the pricing,” he says. “And if we don’t use that buffer, it permits us to supply a reduced launch value as an alternative.” The beginning value is a bit excessive for a second telephone, however Commodore’s timing is definitely fairly good. An increasing number of individuals are on the lookout for a approach out of their smartphone, and Y2K nostalgia is again in full swing. Possibly Commodore’s time actually has come once more.
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