Seiko Phone Cards
While it doesn’t rise to the level of a customized Game Boy game, and *technically* doesn’t even qualify as a Zscaler logo, I wanted to take a moment share the two latest additions to my menagerie of weird and/or obsolete gadgets: a pair of Seiko Phone Cards!
These devices date back to the mid/late 1980’s (as best I can tell, online info about these things is pretty sparse), and were a sort of early “Personal Digital Assistant,” allowing the user to quickly store and retrieve contact info, perform basic calculator tasks, etc. The “Executive” model apparently adds some additional features, like text memos, scheduling and audible alarms.Of course, unlike later “true” PDA devices, these are limited to only the built-in functions - there’s no way to add apps or run custom code on these. Even so, they’re both really neat, and surprisingly tiny given their age (standard US quarter in the pics for scale) - they’re clearly designed to mimic the dimensions of a typical business card, and at only 4mm thick, feel surprisingly modern in the hand.
Primitive PDA-type devices like this only had a brief span of a few years as viable products before more fully-featured and expandable competitors like the Apple Newton and Palm Pilot arrived on the scene and ate their proverbial lunch, so it’s fun to get to experience two of them in 2022.
Happy Friday, everyone!
