“You think we need this phone anymore?” I asked my wife.  Although I’d retired ye olde twisted copper line a few years back, going that one step further and losing the VOIP phone - well, that felt a little reckless.  But the fact remained that aside from a weekly call to my wife’s family in Germany, our use usage of that line had dwindled down to getting the occasional cold call for donations from the Police Benevolent Association of New York City (where I hadn’t lived for several years).

Live Simple.  Lean and Mean. (or our pale bourgeois version of it, at least) - to us, it seemed like a good idea at the time.   It turns out we weren’t alone: a recent US government survey claims that 17.5% (or 1 in 6) US households now depend exclusively on cellular networks for telephone service.

Nevertheless, I’ve found these major home network revisions require (ahem) particularly well documented key stakeholder buy-in, so I waited a week or two and asked Anja once again if Skype could be a workable Vonage replacement for her calls home.  Only after getting further assurance did I finally make the ‘Dear John’ call to break it off with Vonage (at one point, to spare the call center operator from having to go through his whole customer retention script with me, I think I might have actually said “it’s not you, it’s me”).

As it happened, though, both Anja and I came to rue that fateful day: my comeuppance coincided with a switch to the iPhone – or should I say to the remarkably dismal (in the NYC metro area at least) AT&T voice network that comes tethered to it like a ball and chain.  For her, it turned out she hated having to either boot up the laptop and run Skype or try to cradle a tiny cell phone on her shoulder during those leisurely Sunday morning calls home to Germany after all…

She’s one resourceful e-shopper, though, and soon came across what I think could be the Next Cool Geek Accessory – the retro cell phone handset. While she uses hers only at home for purely ergonomic reasons, I can imagine these things starting to turn up on the streets of the Williamsburg (and other ghettos of hip), just as black horn rim glasses did 10 years ago.  For the rest of us (those of us old enough to remember), making a call with these huge ancient headsets is somehow strangely reassuring.

Yep. I like this thing - both for the sheer comfort and clunkiness of it, as well as for the juxtaposition of vintage design and current technology - there are even Bluetooth and USB versions available.

Who knows, if my AT&T voice coverage ever improves enough to make it worthwhile, I might just get a Bluetooth handset for my iPhone…