Mobile phone handset aceness

Ages ago I was introduced by someone (I forget who) to the Pokia website. Nik Roope took a mobile phone handsfree earpiece thingy, the handset from an old dial phone and married the two together to create something that looks a little like this...

Obviously, this is an incredibly cool thing to have. However, I forgot about it until recently, when Dr Chris Tubb showed me the phone that he'd rescued from the UWCN skip - a nice black dial phone. I mentioned Pokia to him, and showed him the site. He liked. And Pokia was back in the front of my mind.

Well, I've got a couple of dial phones, rescued from the back yard of The Lovely Jayne's old flat. One's a cream one from the late 60s, identical to the one my grandfather had, so for sentimental reasons I wasn't going to chop that up. The other is a mid 70s office phone with a seriously sweet volume control on the handset, so that was saved as well. Enter eBay, where for �2.49 (plus double that for postage) I've picked up this beauty:

Unlike my two existing phones, this one hasn't been rigged up to work on modern phone lines (old phones used to draw so much current when they rang that in this modern, digital age, they just won't ring). And there's no sentiment involved with it either, so... it's time to get chopping!

I've emailed Nik Roope, who started this insanity, and have received a couple of handy hints from him; and I'm also going to try a couple of things of my own to make the Super Happy Dream Wish Phone (the name I'm using, because it's ace) that extra 5% better... Nokia hansfree kits have a button on to answer and hang-up, and to trigger voice activated dialing - that's going in it for a start - and I'm thinking of using the earpiece (and possibly the microphone) that is used in modern office phones. The old crystal jobbies are way too much for the meagre power a mobile can spare, and Nik uses a couple of nefarious tricks for his Pokias that I'd like to do away with (and in true open source tradition, feed back to him).

Not only that, the dial's not going to be wasted from the phone either... it has an appointment with a computer for a supercool alternative to Sony's Jogdial =) All progress will be reported to anyone who is interested, naturally!