Phones through the ages feature in exhibition at Te Manawa, Palmerston North

The 1980 Mickey Mouse novelty phone, the Nokia 2280 and a 1980s Motorola Mobile from Te Manawa’s collection.

By Ryan Knighton, communications adviser, Te Manawa

When we think about the vast distance between the world we were born into and the one in we’ll leave behind, my mind boggles.

We love our smartphone; we’re co-dependent. It’s our alarm, our news (both fake and real) and will even create curated music playlist for us. Jetsons, eat your heart out.

As technology rapidly changes, it’s humbling to look back on what we, in our own lived history, once saw as the cutting edge.

Te Manawa Museum’s collection has three phones that called out to us – but it wasn’t their ability to wake us up or play songs that made us listen in.

An indestructible blue brick that sold over 126 million units worldwide, the Nokia 2280 is an icon. Released in September 2000, it quickly became the staple mobile phone due to its long battery life and meme worthy durability.

It featured a monochrome display, an alphanumeric keypad and the beloved Snake, the genesis of the mobile gaming. Its ringtone is still the best way to experience Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, Badinerie from Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 2 and the original Nokia Tune.

Just as we might personalise our smartphones today by setting the wallpaper to a beloved pet, people expressed themselves with landline phones.

Part of a limited-edition series created in partnership with Walt Disney, this Mickey Mouse phones has an ingenious design which sees the user unclip Mickey’s backpack to reveal that it is, in fact, a telephone receiver.

These phones now fetch prices on the secondary market ranging from around $40 to as high as $220 for the rarest pieces of Mouse paraphernalia. Finally the Motorola brick phone from the 1980s.

By modern standards, this phone was quite large and heavy, weighing around about 1.1kg. It boasted a talk time of just a few hours before needing a complete recharge.

These early mobile phones cost several months’ wages for the average New Zealander. Te Manawa is launching its own telephones exhibit later this year.

From late October, Call Me, Maybe will show us how phones and the way we used them have changed over the last century. Karis Evans, heritage curator, is excited to talk about how the culture of phone use has changed.

“It’s easy to forget that phones didn’t just arrive in our pockets, charged up and ready to scroll,” she said.

“Phone use in Palmerston North really only picked up in the 1890s, and back then you could only use them for talking. But that’s what made them so exciting. In the 1890s, the idea of talking to someone far away was a real thrill.

“Nowadays, we hardly use our phones for talking at all.”

You can discover your own piece of telephonic technology by exploring our collection online - something that you can do on your phone, or come in and experience Call Me, Maybe in person when it opens at Te Manawa this October.