The Phone of the Future! (It wasn't.)
April 15, 2010 2 Comments Friday, April 16th, 2010 Netcast 1070
This is the Philips P100 Screen Phone, sometimes referred to as the Philips Enhanced telephone. It was one of the first high tech telephones that set out to do far more than make and receive calls. Along with higher end phone features like one-touch dialing, speakerphone, caller ID, etc., it had some really unique features. There was a full QWERTY slide out keyboard, a large 100 phone directory to store names and phone numbers, even a printer port. Plus there was even a credit card slot so you wouldn’t have to manually type in the CC info. (Credit Card companies never got behind the technology, so that feature was useless. There was a small tilt-up video screen to display info like phone number, caller ID and the phone directory entries. I recall it the screen had black numbers on a green background. The phone itself was available in black or white and it was fairly expensive. 
I think it was $299.00 when it was first released, but then dropped to $199.00. But even at the lower price it wasn’t much a seller. So it became a catch-22 situation. Most of “gee-whiz” features never worked because Philips and other companies were waiting for the phone to be in a lot of homes first, and it wasn’t in a lot of homes because most of “gee-whiz” features couldn’t be used! About the only real use now for this phone is to take up space in Dick’s Gadget Warehouse! Above right: the slide out keypad.
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Reader Comments (2)
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Thanks for the flashback. I had one of these as a freebie. It was through some UPS shipping account. It had a tiny little thermal printer hooked to it. I could type someones name and address in, package weight, service type, and it printed the shipping label. It would memorize hundreds, maybe thousands of addresses, so it made repeat customer shipments a snap. And hell it was a cool phone to boot, lol.
This survived a long time even after UPS went to other methods, but finally the wife made me get rid of it using that great, you never use it, you never will use it, logic of hers.