Today for Tomorrow: Vintage Ericsson Com Tech Adverts

Ericsson is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world, and they got to be that way through more than a century of innovation and hard work. But regardless of how innovative they always have been, looking back on futuristic predictions of the past always provides a laugh. These two vintage Ericsson commercials are definitely good for a chuckle as they introduce or predict new products and services from the company.

The first commercial promises technology that probably seemed pretty great in the mid-1980s but which no one really uses today. Things like wake-up calls and call forwarding not only never took off, but were replaced by simpler and cheaper options.

The second video is for a device that pre-dates text messaging. It was called the Chatboard, and it plugged into a mobile phone for voice-free chatting. It turned out to be very close to the direction that mobile phone technology actually went in, with lots of today’s phone models coming with full QWERTY keyboards.

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See more in Vintage Videos or under Vintage & Retro. August, 2010.