{"id":894,"date":"2014-06-01T20:20:20","date_gmt":"2014-06-01T19:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.conferencecall.co.uk\/blog\/?p=894"},"modified":"2016-02-02T14:47:58","modified_gmt":"2016-02-02T14:47:58","slug":"tech-trip-back-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conferencecall.co.uk\/blog\/tech-trip-back-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech a trip back in time…"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’ve ventured up in to the loft lately, or cleared out the garage, there’s a chance you may\u00a0have stumbled across some old bits of tech, such as a cassette player\u00a0or an old Nokia – let’s face it, everybody<\/em> had a Nokia when mobiles first came out.<\/p>\n

And while ‘tech’ might be pushing it a bit – has a tape deck ever been ‘hi-tech’? – these old bits of kit could be worth a few quid as some people (hipsters, probably) are going mad for retro tech as they look to make a stand\u00a0against modern…well, anything…and party like it’s 1999.<\/p>\n

Find the right buyer and not only could you offload your junk, you can also rip off a hipster while you’re at it. Win-win.<\/p>\n

So, what sort of gear can you expect to get rid of?<\/p>\n

No call for your old phone?<\/h2>\n

Apparently, there’s a growing market for old mobile phones, particularly the iconic Nokia models which scream ’90s’ louder louder than the Spice Girls knocking about in a Union Flag bus. Not only that, if you can bare\u00a0to part with your old 8210, you could get around \u00a350 for it!<\/p>\n

With that in mind, it’d be interesting to see how sales of The Brick <\/a>are going…<\/p>\n

James Charlton, a senior lecturer in Creative Technology at AUT (that’s Auckland University, in New Zealand) reckons people are looking to old handsets because smartphones are too expensive and there’s pressure to always be switched on (for more on that, read Are you suffering from ‘tech stress’?<\/a>).<\/p>\n

But really, it’s likely to be nothing more than plain old nostalgia – which means if you were to go retro and whip\u00a0out an\u00a08210 down the pub (always down the pub) it’ll undoubtedly get an enthusiastic reaction at first, but within seconds the novelty will have worn off (even Snake won’t keep anyone’s attention) and people will turn once more to their smartphones, and probably Tweet that someone down the pub brought an old Nokia with them and they’re not sure if that’s his actual phone.<\/p>\n

Everyone except you, that is – you don’t have Twitter on your 8210 because it wasn’t invented back then – look though, you can make a pixelated naked lady out of number 8’s, W’s, and exclamation marks.<\/p>\n

And if you think that’s bad, there are actually people out there who want a return to tapes…<\/p>\n

C30, C60, C90 Go<\/h2>\n

I find it a bit odd when\u00a0people get\u00a0all wistful about their old vinyl records – I get it, having thumbed through countless gatefolds and the like in my dad’s and uncles’ record collections, I can see there is a bit of romance there.<\/p>\n

\"By
By Itsramon (Own work) [GFDL<\/a> or CC-BY-SA-3.0<\/a>], via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>Tapes though? Tapes were rubbish! Of course, they\u00a0were more portable than vinyl – though portable music in the 80s meant having a Walkman\u00a0the size of a house brick clipped to your belt and, unless you wanted a maximum of 90 minutes’ music before you were on repeat, a rucksack full of tapes containing some albums you actually bought on tape, but mostly hastily recorded songs off the radio.<\/p>\n

And no matter how handy you were with the pause button, you always got a bit of Bruno Brookes voice or an annoying jingle. Only those who were a couple of hits short of a top 40 taped off commercial radio as this brought with it the added annoyance of the adverts.<\/p>\n