In an extensive interview with our founder, Ben Wood, recorded at the Museum’s launch event in London, the BBC’s Chris Fox discussed four key categories in the collection: Ugly phones, devices featured in the Movies, phones that were Firsts and Best Selling mobiles.

The Nokia 7600 was selected as a phone from the Ugly collection and Ben discussed the unique keypad which proved a challenge when it came to sending text messages and making phone calls.

Chris was astonished to see that the Mobile Phone Museum had the Ericsson JB988 in its collection. This specially commissioned model, which featured in the James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies, was made by talented modelmakers Phase Two Design who created it from scratch. You can see a fascinating “making of” video here.

When looking at phones that represented “Firsts” the obvious candidate was the Vodafone VT1 – the phone that was used to make the first phone call in the UK on 1 January 1985.

Chris also picked out other notable devices from the collection and conducted an interview, with Nils Martensson, the founder of UK based phone maker Technophone. Nils’ company created the first “pocketable” mobile phone back in 1986 – the Technophone Excell PC105T.

The museum launch event was also attended by recently retired BBC tech legend, Rory Cellan-Jones. He wrote a lovely piece about the museum which can be found here.