When Christian Simpson, a retro gaming YouTuber also known as Peri Fractic, bought the remains of an early PC company called Commodore in 2025, he decided to pick up right where the original Commodore left off. Which meant starting product development in the mid-1990s. Simpson and his team first set to work reviving the company’s most iconic product, and you can now buy a Commodore 64 that is the spitting image of the 1982 original (other than the Wi-Fi connectivity, the USB ports, and a few other slightly modern niceties). It’s a pure nostalgia play, and by most accounts a very good one. Commodore says it has sold 30,000 of them since last year.
After that, things began to get hypothetical. The turn of the 21st century was the beginning of the cellphone era, when companies like Nokia ruled the technological world. Simpson found himself asking: What would Commodore have done? Made a phone, surely. “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 getting ready to ship the phone the original Commodore never dreamed of. It’s called the Callback 8020, it’s a flip phone, and it starts at $499. With features and colors straight out of the early aughts, Simpson seems to hope it can once again satiate people’s gadget nostalgia, while also providing an answer to a very 2026 problem: We’re all on our phones too much.
The translucent blue looks great — but you’ll pay extra for it. Image: Commodore
It’s not an impressive piece of computing hardware, but it’s not really trying to be. It has a 3.25-inch, 480 x 640 screen on the inside, a MediaTek Helio G81 processor, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, a headphone jack, and an FM radio antenna. The retro stylings read “retro”; the spec sheet reads “probably a little slow.”
Philosophically, the Callback has a lot in common with devices like the Light Phone, and tries to strike the same tricky balance between giving people all the features they need and exactly nothing else. “This is really the phone between dumb and smart,” Simpson says. It blocks social media and web browsers entirely; the phone isn’t even allowed to access Facebook’s servers. Because the device runs a version of Jolla’s privacy-focused Sailfish operating system, though, it can technically run just about any Android app.
Rather than try to guess exactly what users want, Commodore’s plan is to build an allow-listing system, by which users can request to have an Android app added to the Callback’s store, and a combination of AI and human reviewers will decide what’s acceptable. (And, of course, for everything else there’s sideloading.) Simpson seems game to add things like Uber and Spotify, and is fully ready to stop time-sucks like Slack and Gmail from ever ending up on a Callback.
For at least one computer company, it’s the 20th century all over again. Photo: Commodore
Commodore imagines the Callback as a nights-and-weekends phone for getting away from all your work apps and notifications. The whole phone is designed to be quieter: It has five colored LEDs that glow when you have a notification, rather than buzzing in your pocket. The phone’s outer screen only ever shows the time, date, battery level, and connectivity status. You can take pictures with the 48-megapixel camera, send messages via voice or old-school T9 typing, listen to music with the “audiophile-grade” DAC and included headphones, make calls, and not much else.
The standard Callback model comes in beige, white, and silver. There’s also a very cool translucent blue model for $549.99, and a gold “Founders Edition” model for $640. Commodore’s plan is to start shipping the phones by the end of this year, and Simpson seems confident he can get it done even with the shrinking supply of RAM and other components. “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 starting price is a bit high for a second phone, but Commodore’s timing is actually quite good. More and more people are looking for a way out of their smartphone, and Y2K nostalgia is back in full swing. Maybe Commodore’s time really has come again.
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