She builds tools for space exploration — but her cellphone is strictly down to earth.
Justine Haupt, 34, hates smartphones. She hates the way they work, and she hates the way they rule our lives.
“I work in technology but I don’t like the culture around smartphones,” says the astronomy instrumentation engineer from Long Island.
“I’m an engineer, I love technology,” Haupt, who has never owned a smartphone, tells Newsflare. “But the phone is not the way I want to do it.”
That’s why, three years ago, the smartphone skeptic decided to make another call — by building her own rudimentary cellphone, with no LED screen, a clunky antenna and a rotary dial. And it’s functional where she needs it most.
“The battery lasts for a solid 24 hours, maybe 30 hours,” says Haupt. The “sleek” mobile measures 4 inches tall, 3 inches wide and 1 inch thick — “as compact as possible,” she says.
“It fits into my pocket and, in total bulk, I don’t think it is much bigger than a large smartphone with a protective case on it,” she says.
However, Haupt, who works at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, isn’t completely disconnected. Before resorting to building her own, she also test-ran a Samsung Galaxy that she’d purchased for her mother. But, after a month, she went back to the flip-phone she had been using. Still, she wanted an “even more dumbed down phone” — primarily because she hates texting.
“I’ve never texted, and building this phone was in part so that I would have a good excuse for not texting,” she says. “Now I can hold up this phone and say, ‘No, I can’t text.’ ”
As someone who builds gadgets for a living, she thinks the smartphone “interface is absolutely horrible.”
“When you open an application and then you want it to go away but you don’t know if it is closed — that grates against the fiber of my being,” says Haupt.
So when she decided to build a prototype, the first thing she decided was that she wanted a rotary dial.
“Rotary dials are neat and I wanted to include them in a project,” she says. She sourced a spare from an old Trimline telephone — a wall-unit style that was popular in the ’60s and ’70s, with a compact dial that would have been able to fit in her pocket.
For the inner workings, she bought a cellphone radio development board from Adafruit, a hardware company, and designed her own circuitry. Then she used a 3-D printer to create a case.
She did require a few upgrades. To make important calls as quickly as possible, she added two speed-dial buttons, one labeled “La” and the other “Da” — for her mother, Lorraine Labate, 60, and husband, David Van Popering, 57, respectively.
She also added a small e-paper display — like a Kindle screen — to be able to see incoming text messages and missed calls.
Thankfully, she doesn’t have a long contacts list.
“In rare cases when I want to call a new number, I do use the rotary dial,” says Haupt, using a prepaid AT&T SIM card for cell service, “and it is a fun, tactile experience.”
Her project unfolded in fits and starts. “I lost interest and it was in a box in the closet for a while,” she says, until about two months ago when she told herself “I’m just going to finish this thing.”
Her persistence paid off. On Feb. 10, she published a post on her blog about the DIY cellphone. The entry was so popular, her website crashed from reader traffic.
“I never expected to go viral with this,” says Haupt. “There was so much demand … everyone was clamoring and I got so many emails from people begging to buy the phone.”
Although she had never intended to monetize her phone, an interested buyer suggested she create a kit for customers to make their own the way she did.
“I very quickly put together a new version of the circuit that would be a little more robust,” she says, which goes for $170 per kit through her company, Sky’s Edge. But buyers will have to source their own vintage rotary dials, which are now out of production.
Still, she’s already fulfilled 30 orders. “Now I’m looking at making a more inclusive kit that will come with everything you need,” she says.
She admitted she’s “not totally sure” why her primitive mobile phone has garnered so much interest.
“Maybe they see it as a hipster gadget, which I hate because, to me, it’s an actual phone,” she complains. “But there’s a surprising number of people who have identified with my philosophy of not liking smartphone culture — I’m pleasantly surprised that those people are out there.”
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Space engineer who hates smartphones builds cellphone with rotary dial - New York Post
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