You guys need to see what Christian Simpson is doing with the Commodore brand — it's one of the coolest retro-revival stories I've covered in a long time. After buying up the remains and relaunching under CallStar, he decided to play out their history backward by starting product development like they would have in 1985 instead of 2025. That means his first big move wasn't cutting-edge tech — it was resurrecting the C64 with modern internals, selling about 30,000 units since last year that look identical to the 1982 original but include Wi-Fi and USB ports. It's pure nostalgia bait done right, because people who grew up on Commodore just want a piece of their childhood they can actually use today.
Then things got interesting — Simpson asked himself what Commodore would have built in the cell phone era before Nokia dominated the market, and his answer led to this: the CallBack 8020 flip phone. It's priced at $499, which is wild for a niche retro device but makes sense if you view it as both a statement piece and functional hardware rather than just a toy. The Starlight Edition features translucent blue casing that screams early-2000s design language while packing modern internals behind the nostalgic shell. You're getting an original CallStar logo font on the face, tactile buttons with real clickiness, and a build quality far beyond what you see in cheap replica phones — this is premium retro engineering at work.
But there's a deeper layer here that makes me respect this move even more than just as nostalgia bait. Simpson built it as an answer to our collective phone addiction in 2026, explicitly saying the company would have followed Apple and produced their own flagship if they hadn't been gutted by CBS. The CallBack is designed for people who want a device with intentional boundaries — a phone you use when you mean to, not one that pings every second of your day. It hits two audiences at once: retro collectors who will buy it for the history and for the form factor no matter what it does, and a growing crowd looking for digital detox solutions in an era where we're all on our phones way too much. Either way, this is one of those rare tech releases that feels like a genuine statement rather than just another product launch to me.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/tech/950190/commodore-callback-flip-phone
Then things got interesting — Simpson asked himself what Commodore would have built in the cell phone era before Nokia dominated the market, and his answer led to this: the CallBack 8020 flip phone. It's priced at $499, which is wild for a niche retro device but makes sense if you view it as both a statement piece and functional hardware rather than just a toy. The Starlight Edition features translucent blue casing that screams early-2000s design language while packing modern internals behind the nostalgic shell. You're getting an original CallStar logo font on the face, tactile buttons with real clickiness, and a build quality far beyond what you see in cheap replica phones — this is premium retro engineering at work.
But there's a deeper layer here that makes me respect this move even more than just as nostalgia bait. Simpson built it as an answer to our collective phone addiction in 2026, explicitly saying the company would have followed Apple and produced their own flagship if they hadn't been gutted by CBS. The CallBack is designed for people who want a device with intentional boundaries — a phone you use when you mean to, not one that pings every second of your day. It hits two audiences at once: retro collectors who will buy it for the history and for the form factor no matter what it does, and a growing crowd looking for digital detox solutions in an era where we're all on our phones way too much. Either way, this is one of those rare tech releases that feels like a genuine statement rather than just another product launch to me.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/tech/950190/commodore-callback-flip-phone