When Christian Simpson, a retro gaming YouTuber also known as Peri Fractic, bought the remains of an early PC company called Commodore in 2025, he decided to pick up where the original Commodore left off. Which meant starting product development in the mid-1990s. Simpson and his team first worked to revive the company’s iconic product, and now you can buy a Commodore 64 that’s a spitting image of the 1982 original (minus Wi-Fi connectivity, USB ports, and a few other modern niceties). It’s a pure nostalgia game, and by many accounts very good. Commodore says it has sold 30,000 since last year.
After that, things started to take shape. The beginning of the 21st century was the beginning of the mobile phone era, when companies like Nokia ruled the world of technology. Simpson found himself asking: What did Commodore do? He made the call, of course. “I think they were going to go after Apple,” Simpson tells me, “and eventually release the iPhone. Or, at least, the iPhone the phone. All other companies have happened. “
The new Commodore is now preparing to send a call that the original Commodore never dreamed of. It’s called the Callback 8020, it’s a flip phone, and it starts at $499. With features and colors from the early aughts, Simpson seems to hope to once again satisfy people’s gadget nostalgia, while offering an answer to the biggest problem of 2026: We’re all on our phones too much.
It’s not an impressive piece of computer hardware, but it’s not really trying to be. It has a 3.25 inch screen, 480 x 640 inside, MediaTek Helio G81 processor, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage space, headphone jack, FM radio. Retro styles read “retro”; the spec sheet reads “probably slow.”
Philosophically, the Callback is very similar to devices like the Light Phone, and tries to strike the same delicate balance between giving people all the features they need and nothing more. “This is really a dumb and smart phone,” Simpson said. Blocks social media and web browsers completely; the phone is not even allowed to access the Facebook servers. Because the device runs Jolla’s privacy-focused version of the Sailfish operating system, however, it can technically run any Android operating system.
Rather than trying to guess exactly what users want, Commodore’s plan is to build a listing system, where users can request an Android app to be added to the Callback store, and a combination of AI and human reviewers will decide what’s 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-sucks like Slack and Gmail from ending up in Callback.
Commodore envisions the Callback as a night and weekend phone to get away from all your apps and notifications. The whole phone is designed to be quiet: It has five colored LEDs that light up when you have a notification, rather than buzzing in your pocket. The phone’s external screen only shows the time, date, battery level, and connection status. You can take pictures with the 48-megapixel camera, send messages by voice or old-school T9 typing, listen to music with the “audiophile-grade” DAC and built-in headphones, make calls, and not much else.
The standard Callback model comes in beige, white, and silver. There’s also a very cool shiny blue model for $549.99, and a gold “Founders Edition” model for $640. Commodore’s plan is to start shipping phones by the end of this year, and Simpson seems confident they can do it even with limited RAM and other supplies. “We have created a price barrier,” he said. “And if we don’t use that storage, it allows us to offer a discounted introductory price.” The initial price is a bit higher for the second phone, but Commodore’s timing is really good. 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 come again.
