At the Mobile Phone Museum, a collection of more than 2,800 models dating back to the 1980s are on display.
Whether it be the Nokia “brick” or a Motorola flip phone, the online gallery encapsulates an era of technological variety that some enthusiasts fear has now been lost.
“We lived through two decades of intensive device diversity with phones of all shapes and sizes – candybar phones, flip phones, slider phones, phones that spun around,” says Ben Wood, founder of the museum and chief analyst at CCS Insight.
“Then in January 2007, Steve Jobs walked on stage and pulled the iPhone out of his pocket and effectively created what has become the dominant design for a phone. So we live in this sea of sameness now with all phones pretty much looking the same.”
His comments underscore the sense of stagnation in a mobile phone market that, after decades of innovation, appears to have reached maturity.
At the same time, the eye-watering cost of new devices has deterred many buyers from splashing out on the latest gadgets.
As a result, phone makers are now hoping that advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) will revitalise interest in smartphones, reversing a recent slump in demand.
The decline in mobile phone sales has been marked. Apple reported a 10pc drop in iPhone sales in its most recent quarter, while network operators such as Vodafone and Virgin Media O2 are estimated to have suffered a drop in handset sales of around 20pc last year.
Yet this is just part of a broader downward trend. Mobile phone sales in the UK stood at 29.7m units in 2013. A decade later, that fell to just 13.4m in 2023, according to estimates from CCS Insight.