How to Turn a Landline Phone Into a Cell Phone Bluetooth Receiver
I’m not usually nostalgic, but I miss landlines. Cell phones can do eight billion things, but they’re tiny and inconsequential—artificial, semi-disposable black rectangles—while old phones have weight, material, and style. They come in different colors. The receiver feels good in the hand. It’s great when you hang up to hang up on some jerk – angrily poking the end button on your iPhone isn’t even close. Older phones sound even better: ringtones come from real bells – much more real than a melody or digital ringing – and the sound of a voice on a mobile phone is terrible compared to the same voice on an analog phone.
Whether you want to go back to the old days of our pre-digital past or experience it for the first time, you don’t need to register for a landline. An old push-button or rotary phone can easily be turned into a Bluetooth receiver that works with your mobile phone and performs almost as well as a dedicated landline phone. Here’s how to do it.
How to Turn an Old Landline Phone into a Cell Phone Bluetooth Receiver
Take an old phone. If you don’t have one in your attic, there are thousands of old phones on eBay that you can buy at very reasonable prices, ranging from the ubiquitous 1980s beige push-button models to classic black rotary phones and pink princesses . and new cheeseburger phones .
Get a specialized jack. There are several ready-made devices that instantly turn your old phone into an old phone that receives cellular calls. Cell2Jack sells for around $30 and the Xlink BT Bluetooth Gateway allows you to connect three different cell phones to the same landline and costs around $90.
Pick up. Most older phones don’t have separate power supplies because the power comes from the same wire that carries the sounds (such a sleek design) so you have to plug the plug into a wall outlet and plug the phone cord into the jack. and phone. Once you’ve done that, you just need to press the “pair” button and pair the Bluetooth with your mobile phone and that’s it. Now you have an old school phone with an old-fashioned ringer, rotary or push-button dialing, a beep when you pick up the phone, and even a busy signal.
Make some calls. Now you can experience the pleasure of a mechanical click, the clicky sound of a rotary switch, or the pleasantly dissonant sounds of a push-button phone establishing a connection. Your new phone has the same phone number as your cell phone, and when someone calls you will be amazed at how damn loud the phones ring. Spend many hours talking with your friends. Pay attention to how well the phone fits in your hand and how well the ear cushions wrap around your ear. Remember to absently wind the coiled cord around your finger while talking.
One Way Your Bluetooth Phone Will Stay Worse than Old School Phones
Calls made through POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) sound better than calls made through mobile phones. Cell phones convert sound into electrical signals and send them thousands of miles away, then instantly convert them back into sounds. To minimize latency, cell phones limit the audio signal they convert. But that’s not all: to make speech more intelligible in a smaller “space,” cell phones cut out some frequencies and boost others, giving people’s voices a compressed, robotic look. Old school phones gave richer, less noisy and more natural sound because they don’t have the space constraints of digital phones.
Your new franken phone will play this compressed signal on a different type of speaker, so it won’t sound as rich as landline-to-landline calls once did. The speaker will most likely be louder and less harsh than your mobile phone speaker.