Commodore’s Callback 8020 is a retro phone with a modern twist

When Christian Simpson, a retro gaming YouTuber also known as Peri Fractic, bought the remains of the original PC company Commodore in 2025, he decided to pick up where the original Commodore left off. Which means we’re going to start developing in the mid-1990s. Simpson and his team started working on reviving the company’s most famous brand, and you can now. buy a Commodore 64 it’s the spitting image of the 1982 original (minus Wi-Fi connectivity, USB ports, and other modern conveniences). It’s a drama of passion, and by many accounts a very good one. Commodore says it has sold 30,000 of them since last year.

After that, things started to get weird. The turn of the 21st century was the dawn of the mobile phone era, when companies like Nokia dominated the technology world. Simpson wondered: What would the Commodore have done? He made a phone call, of course. “I think they would have followed Apple,” Simpson tells me, “and eventually released the iPhone. phone. Every other company did. “

The new Commodore is now planning to ship a phone that the original Commodore never dreamed of. It’s called the Callback 8020, it’s a cell phone, and it starts at $499. With shapes and colors from the original series, Simpson seems to hope that he can satiate people’s devices again, and offer a solution to the problem of 2026: We are all on our phones too much.

It’s not an impressive piece of computer hardware, but it’s not trying to be. It has a 3.25-inch, 480 x 640 screen, a MediaTek Helio G81 processor, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, a headphone jack, and an FM radio antenna. Retro art is considered “retro”; the paper says “perhaps slowly.”

Concept-wise, Callback is very similar to devices like the Bright Phone, and it tries to strike a balance between giving people everything they need and nothing else. “This is the phone call between the dumb and the smart,” says Simpson. Blocks public browsers and websites; the phone is not even allowed to access the Facebook servers. Because the device runs on Jolla’s version of the Sailfish operating system, however, it can technically run almost any Android app.

Instead of trying to guess exactly what users want, Commodore’s plan is to create a permission system, where users can request that an Android app be added to the Callback store, and a combination of AI and human reviewers will decide what is acceptable. (And, of course, for everything else there’s sideloading.) Simpson seems game to add things like Uber and Spotify, and he’s fully prepared to stop time-sucking like Slack and Gmail from ending up on Callback.

Commodore envisions Callback as a night and weekend phone for escaping all your work programs and notifications. The entire phone is designed to be silent: It has five color LEDs that light up when you have a notification, instead of ringing in your pocket. The phone’s external display only shows the time, date, battery level, and connection status. You can take pictures with a 48-megapixel camera, send messages via voice or type T9 in the old school, listen to music with an “audiophile-grade” DAC and connect headphones, make calls, and not much more.

The standard version of the Callback comes in beige, white, and silver. There’s also a fancy blue version for $549.99, and a gold “Founders Edition” version for $640. Commodore’s plan is to start shipping phones by the end of this year, and Simpson seems confident they can do so even with limited RAM and other hardware. “We have created a tree reserve,” he says. “And if we don’t use a buffer, it allows us to offer a lower cost instead.” The starting price is a bit high for a second hand phone, but the Commodore’s timing is excellent. More and more people are looking for a way out of their smartphone, and Y2K nostalgia is back in full swing. Perhaps the Commodore’s time has indeed come.