Phones were different by design.

Before the touchscreen became the default, a phone’s shape told you what it was for. A camera phone placed the shutter key under your finger. A music phone put playback controls on the outside. A slider turned answering a call into a physical gesture. Materials, screens and batteries imposed limits, but those limits gave designers something productive to respond to.

The RetroPhones archive studies those decisions rather than treating old phones as a list of specifications. We look at how an object was held, what its controls encouraged, which audience it addressed and why its personality still matters.