About 120 miles (and roughly 200 kilometers) southeast of Seoul, South Korea, the industrial city of Gumi huffs and puffs with factories for several of Samsung's and LG's divisions. It's here that Samsung has a special museum dedicated to preserving its cell phones...and other notable telecommunications specimens, too.
1983. That's when Motorola's $4,000 (roughly £2,570 and AU$4,926) cell phone, far left, broke onto the scene. 1988 is when Samsung answered with its first mobile phone, the SH-100 (middle).
You're standing in a dark room. All of a sudden, the sound of a flipping switch, and this: walls of cases light up holding nearly every cellular phone that Samsung has ever made.
This gem from 2005, the SCH-B100 Satellite DMB phone (digital multimedia broadcasting) had a flip-out screen for watching video clips horizontally. Anycall is a Samsung sub-brand for its Asian markets.
That red, slim thing in the center? That's the Samsung Juke, a 2007 entrant that played MP3s when closed, and which swiveled open to serve as a cell phone.
Branded as an Anycall product, the wacky SPH-P9200, (known internally as the Butterfly), folded open to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard on top of its telephone controls.
Back in 1882, this wall set was cutting-edge. The oak telephone was built for the Bell system. It consisted of a hand-cranked magneto, an alternating current generator, which you turned to connect to a switchboard operator, who would then put you through to the other party.
