If you lose dialing and/or turn off the receiver, you can turn an old phone into a Bluetooth phone.
I'm not normally the nostalgic type, but I miss landlines. Cell phones can do eight billion things, but they are tiny and inconsequential – artificial, semi-disposable black rectangles – whereas old phones have weight, substance and style.
They come in many colors. The receiver feels good in your hand. AND excellent when you slam the phone down to hang up on some idiot — furiously poking the off button on your iPhone doesn't even come close.
Old phones sound even better: the ringtones come from bells real – much more real than a little song or squonk digital – and the sound of a voice on a cell phone is terrible compared to the same voice on an analog phone.
If you want to revisit the old days of our pre-digital past or try it out for the first time, you don't need to sign up for a landline. It's easy to convert an old push-button or rotary telephone into a Bluetooth receiver that works with your cell phone and almost as well as a dedicated landline. Here's how to make it happen.
Use your cell phone as a Bluetooth adapter and turn an old landline into a cell phone Bluetooth receiver
- Get an old phone. If there isn't one in your attic, there are thousands of vintage phones on eBay that can be purchased for very reasonable prices, ranging from the ubiquitous beige button models of the 1980s, to classic black rotary phones and the pink “princess.” ” phones, and new cheeseburger phones.
- Get a specialized jack. There are some ready-made devices that instantly turn your old phone into an old phone that receives cell phone calls. The Cell2Jack sells for around US$ 30, and the Xlink BT Bluetooth Gateway allows you to connect three different cell phones to the same landline and costs around US$ 90.
- Plug it in. Most old telephones do not have separate power sources because the power comes from the same wire that transmits the sounds (such a neat design), so you will have to plug the jack into an electrical outlet and connect a telephone cord to the jack and the telephone. Once that's done, just press the “pair” button and pair the Bluetooth on your cell phone, and that's it. Now you have an old-school telephone, complete with an old-school ringer, rotary or push-button dialing, a dial tone when you answer the receiver, and even a busy signal.
- Make some calls. Now you can experience the joy of chunka-chunka-chunk mechanic, the sound of a rotary dial, or the satisfying discordant sounds of a push-button telephone making a connection. Your new phone has the same phone number as your cell phone, and when someone calls, you'll be surprised to see how phones used to ring a lot high . Spend many hours chatting with your friends. Notice how the phone looks good in your hand and how the earbud fits perfectly in your ear. Don't forget to absentmindedly wrap the wrapped thread around your finger as you speak.
The only way your Bluetooth phone will remain inferior to old phones
Calls made through POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) sound better than calls made through cell phones. Cell phones convert sound into electrical signals and send them thousands of miles away and then instantly convert them back into sound. To minimize latency, cell phones limit the sound signal they convert. But that's not all: To make speech more understandable in a smaller “space,” cell phones eliminate some frequencies and boost others, giving people's voices a compressed, robot-like feel. Older phones provided richer, less muffled, more natural sound because they didn't have the space limitations that digital phones have.
Your new Franken phone will play this compressed signal into a different type of speaker, so it won't sound as rich as landline-to-landline calls in the past. The speaker will likely be louder and less “small” than your cell phone's speaker.
