Commodore’s Callback 8020 is a retro flip telephone with trendy beliefs

When Christian Simpson, a retro gaming YouTuber also called Peri Fractic, purchased the stays of an early PC firm known as Commodore in 2025, he determined to select up proper the place the unique Commodore left off. Which meant beginning product improvement within the mid-Nineties. Simpson and his crew first set to work reviving the corporate’s most iconic product, and now you can purchase a Commodore 64 that’s the spitting picture of the 1982 unique (aside from the Wi-Fi connectivity, the USB ports, and some different barely trendy niceties). It’s a pure nostalgia play, and by most accounts, an excellent one. Commodore says it has bought 30,000 of them since final yr.

After that, issues started to get hypothetical. The flip of the twenty first century was the start of the cellphone period, when corporations like Nokia dominated the technological world. Simpson discovered himself asking: What would Commodore have executed? Made a telephone, absolutely. “I think they would have followed Apple,” Simpson tells me, “and ultimately released an iPhone. Or, at least, a phone. Every other company did.”

The new Commodore is now on the point of ship the telephone the unique Commodore by no means dreamed of. It’s known as the Callback 8020, it’s a flip telephone, and it begins at $499. With options and colours straight out of the early aughts, Simpson appears to hope it could actually as soon as once more satiate folks’s gadget nostalgia, whereas additionally offering a solution to a really 2026 drawback: We’re all on our telephones an excessive amount of.

It’s not a powerful piece of computing {hardware}, nevertheless it’s not likely attempting to be. It has a 3.25-inch, 480 x 640 display on the within, a MediaTek Helio G81 processor, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, a headphone jack, and an FM radio antenna. The retro stylings learn “retro”; the spec sheet reads “probably a little slow.”

Philosophically, the Callback has loads in frequent with gadgets just like the Light Phone and tries to strike the identical difficult stability between giving folks all of the options they want and precisely nothing else. “This is really the phone between dumb and smart,” Simpson says. It blocks social media and net browsers solely; the telephone isn’t even allowed to entry Facebook’s servers. Because the gadget runs a model of Jolla’s privacy-focused Sailfish working system, although, it could actually technically run nearly any Android app.

Rather than attempt to guess precisely what customers need, Commodore’s plan is to construct an allow-listing system, by which customers can request to have an Android app added to the Callback’s retailer, and a mix of AI and human reviewers will determine what’s acceptable. (And, in fact, for every little thing else, there’s sideloading.) Simpson appears recreation so as to add issues like Uber and Spotify and is totally able to cease time-sucks like Slack and Gmail from ever ending up on a Callback.

Commodore imagines the Callback as a nights-and-weekends telephone for getting away from all of your work apps and notifications. The entire telephone is designed to be quieter: It has 5 coloured LEDs that glow when you’ve got a notification, slightly than buzzing in your pocket. The telephone’s outer display solely ever reveals the time, date, battery degree, and connectivity standing. You can take footage with the 48-megapixel digital camera, ship messages through voice or old-school T9 typing, hearken to music with the “audiophile-grade” DAC and included headphones, make calls, and never a lot else.

The customary Callback mannequin is available in beige, white, and silver. There’s additionally a really cool translucent blue mannequin for $549.99, and a gold “Founders Edition” mannequin for $640. Commodore’s plan is to begin delivery the telephones by the tip of this yr, and Simpson appears assured he can get it executed even with the shrinking provide of RAM and different parts. “We’ve built in a buffer to the pricing,” he says. “And if we don’t use that buffer, it allows us to offer a discounted launch price instead.” The beginning worth is a bit excessive for a second telephone, however Commodore’s timing is definitely fairly good. More and extra individuals are searching for a approach out of their smartphone, and Y2K nostalgia is again in full swing. Maybe Commodore’s time actually has come once more.