Source: Mrwhosetheboss
tested 42 years of phones: What You Need to Know
THE TL;DW
- Arun Maini (Mrwhosetheboss) visited the Mobile Phone Museum, home to an archive of almost 3,000 handsets, to physically test devices spanning over four decades.
- The video traces the evolution of mobile phones from the earliest brick-sized cellular handsets up through modern smartphones, firing up old hardware on camera.
- Video is sponsored by Surfshark VPN, offering viewers a discount code alongside the historical phone deep-dive.
The Jupiter Take
Mrwhosetheboss built his channel on hands-on phone reviews, and this video turns that format into a history lesson by letting viewers watch decades-old devices actually power on. It’s a rare chance to see how far mobile design, batteries, and interfaces have evolved since the industry’s earliest days.
Context
The Mobile Phone Museum that hosted this shoot is a UK-based nonprofit effort, originally launched online with Vodafone’s backing, built specifically to stop early mobile handsets from disappearing into landfill and forgotten history. Its founder, analyst Ben Wood, has said the ambition was always to mark key anniversaries of mobile telephony, including the 40th anniversary of the first-ever mobile phone call, which took place in 1985, by eventually staging a physical exhibition rather than keeping the archive purely digital (source).
