I’m not usually the nostalgic type, but I do miss landlines. Mobile phones can do eight billion things, but they’re tiny and insignificant: artificial black rectangles and semi-disposable, whereas old phones have weight, substance and style. They come in many colors. The receiver feels good in the hand. It feels great when you put the handset down to hang up a bit – furiously tapping the hang up button on your iPhone doesn’t even come close. Old phones sound even better: the ringtones come from real bells, much more real than a little tune or a digital squonk, and the sound of a voice on a cell phone is terrible compared to the same voice on an analog phone.
Whether you want to revisit the old days of our pre-digital past or experience it for the first time, you don’t need to sign up for a landline. It’s easy to turn an old push button or rotary phone into a Bluetooth receiver that works with your mobile phone almost as well as a dedicated landline phone. Here’s how to make it happen.
How to turn an old landline phone into a Bluetooth mobile phone receiver
Get an old phone. If you don’t have one in the attic, there are thousands of old phones on eBay that can be bought at very reasonable prices, from the ubiquitous beige button models of the 1980s to the classic black rotary phones and the “princess” rose ” phones, and novelty phones for cheeseburgers.
Get a specialized grip. There are a number of ready-made devices that instantly transform your old phone into an old phone that receives mobile calls. Cell2Jack retails for about $30 ($42), and the Xlink BT Bluetooth Gateway lets you connect three different cell phones to the same landline and costs about $90 ($125).
stick it Most old phones don’t have separate power supplies because the power comes from the same wire that carries the sounds (such a neat design), so you’ll need to plug the plug into a wall outlet and plug a phone cord into the dam and the phone Once you do that, just press the “pair” button and pair the Bluetooth from your mobile phone, and you’re done. Now you have an old-school phone, with an old-school ringer, rotary or push-button dial, a dial tone when you pick up the receiver, and even a busy signal.
Make some calls. Now you can experience the joy of the chunka-chunka-chunka mechanical sound of a rotary dial, or the discordant satisfying sounds of a push button phone that connects. Your new phone has the same phone number as your cell phone, and when someone calls, you’ll be surprised how loud the phones used to be. Spend many hours talking with your friends. Consider how the headset feels in your hand and how well the headset fits your ear. Don’t forget to absentmindedly wrap the coiled wire around your finger while talking.
The only way your Bluetooth phone will still be inferior to old school phones
Calls made over POTS (Old Phone Service) sound better than calls made with mobile phones. Cell phones convert sound into electrical signals and send them a thousand miles away and instantly convert them back into sounds. To minimize latency, cell phones limit the sound signal they convert. But that’s not all: to make speech more intelligible in a smaller “space,” cell phones cut out some frequencies and boost others, giving people’s voices a compressed, robotic feel. Old-school phones provided a richer, less muffled, more natural sound, because they don’t have the space limitation that digital phones have.
Your new franken phone will play that compressed signal into a different kind of speaker, so it won’t sound as rich as landline-to-landline calls back in the day. However, the speaker is likely to be louder and less “sticky” than your cell phone speaker.