Last week Madhuban Kumar posed me a question: Is there a mobile museum anywhere, or any museum with a significant collection of old phones? So I decided to take a look. I discovered that the Contempory Museum in Baltimore was the first US museum to showcase an entire collection devoted to the cell phone and its impact on everyday life.

My Google searching didn’t turn up many more museum collections, but there are quite a few personal collections. British businessman Dr Graham Cooley has one of the largest. He lent 120 mobiles from his own collection to the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn, which claims to be the largest computer museum in the world. The phones were featured in the foyer and “constitute one of the largest such collections in Europe”.

The largest physical collection of phones that I found is owned by the mobile phone testing company Mobile Complete, to support their Device Anywhere service. More than 350 phones have been lobotomised, inserted into racks, their covers removed and wires inserted to allow remote operation and viewing over the internet. Not nice if you’re a phone but very nice if you are a mobile web site developer.

If we are talking virtual, rather than physical, then I can offer you some truly impressive collections. Mobilezoo is a new web site that has compiled detailed information on 750 handsets already – see their Evolution Gallery – which anyone can access for free. M:Metrics is a respected mobile market research firm with 1800 devices listed and viewable in their Device Tracker service. WURFL is the biggest of them all, listing 6,860 devices at last count, just technical data though, no pictures.

We certainly do hoard a lot of mobile phones. In the USA probably more than 500 million sit in the back of a drawer gathering dust, worth at least $10 billion in scrap value alone. Recellular Inc. has estimated that 130m mobiles are retired in the US every year. The British hoard a lot too: 52 million at last count.

My conclusion: if you want to create a museum with the world’s largest collection of mobile phones, just go out there onto eBay and start buying. As of today, you will only need a few hundred and you will soon be in the Guinness Book of World Records!

[Photo: Max Glanville Photo]

[tags]mobile phones, cell phones, taptu, taptology, recellular, m:metrics, contemporary museum in baltimore, technology, gadgets, phones[/tags]

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 9:41 am and is filed under Mobile devices, On the Radar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.