Everything old is new again. Haven’t old people been saying that for decades? We’re seeing increasing numbers of people carrying around Discmans and Walkmans for their retro kitsch value. Designers Rocket & Wine are playing on our weird obsession with obsolete technology with their Rawman 3000 concept.

Given the resurgence of portable CD and cassette players, Rocket & Wine designed three sizes of portable vinyl players. The 7″, 10″, and 12″ models are meant to be carried around so you can enjoy the rich, deep sounds of vinyl while you strut down the street. Along, we assume, with all of the skips and scratches that come with moving a record player around while it’s playing.

The Rawman, if it were in fact a real product, would come with stereo headphones, a USB port, Smartcard, an antenna to enable Bluetooth connection, and a carrying strap. When it’s not being carried around, making you look like the hipsterest hipster ever, it could be plugged into home speakers for a “big, rich sound, that […] only can be compared to a very elaborate and expensive component stereo record player system.”

Although the product is a spoof and will most likely never see production, we can absolutely see someone trying to make this happen. After all, if people are enamored with the inferior sound quality and breakage-prone qualities of the cassette, why not strap on a record player to go for a jog?

The post Time Warp Accessories: Wearable Portable Vinyl Players first appeared on Gajitz.

Instant photo cameras nearly disappeared into obscurity around the time digital cameras rose to prominence. Models like the popular OneStep line from Polaroid became part of the retro-chic movement, along with other film cameras like the Holga. Eventually, companies like Instagram completely appropriated the once-dead art form, and Fujifilm are continuing the tradition.

Fujifilm Japan recently announced the Instax Mini 90, an instant film camera that furthers the company’s obsession with retro-designed cameras. It delivers a photograph in seconds and has features like bulb exposure, double exposure and a 60mm f/12 lens.

The video for the Mini 90 stresses the phrase “neo-classic” as a selling point. It’s quite obviously geared toward social media-obsessed trend followers whose need for instant gratification has driven an entire lifestyle in the last decade (we won’t say the ‘h’ word, but you know who you are).

The post Instantly Retro: Fujifilm Has Yet Another New Old Camera first appeared on Gajitz.

Do you ever miss the simpler days when all your mobile phone could do was make and receive calls? There was no texting, no time-sucking games, no email or stock quotes. Sure, it was less convenient, but some of us actually looked up when walking around back then rather than constantly hunching over a little screen. French company Lëkki is taking the world back to the 90s with their brilliant marketing plan to reissue the same kind of old mobile handsets that most of us carried proudly 15 years ago – which is like three centuries in phone years.

The Motorola StarTAC was a pretty rad phone in 1996, but today it looks decidedly old-fashioned. Lekki noticed a proliferation of these old phones that still work just fine but have long ago been discarded by their owners and decided to do something creative about it. They revamp the classic handsets, add some kicky colors, and sell them on to you, the lover of all things 90s. (As long as you live in Europe, that is – the phones don’t work elsewhere.)

For the not-completely-outrageous sum of 139 Euros, you get a refurbished StarTAC that Motorola no longer services or sells batteries for. It can handle standard SMS texting provided there are no special characters involved, and Lekki ensures that the batteries have all been tested. For those oh-so-ironic hipsters out there who enjoy using goofy retro gadgets just for the fun of it, these 90s cell phones will undoubtedly be a big hit. But using an “antique” cell phone makes a lot of sense from an environmental standpoint: electronic waste is a huge problem that is only growing year by year, and most phones from the 90s were built to last longer than today’s flimsy smartphones. So if you can handle being labeled a hipster, maybe carrying a decade-old mobile phone isn’t such a crazy idea after all.

The post Boldly Taking Cell Phone Tech Where It’s Already Been first appeared on Gajitz.