(Since Mike owns this collectible, he's the author of this piece.)


There are very few obsessive personalities more potent than that of a Trekkie, but a close runner-up is that of a cell-phone geek.  When these two worlds collide (i.e., if you're me), the results aren't always predictable.

So I found out, anyway, one late week night as I passed the hours browsing eBay.  Incredibly, this device showed up - a very rare prototype (one of only 12 made) of something true Trekkers have been dreaming about since cell phones became commonplace:  a mobile phone in the form of a Star Trek communicator.

Apparently (according to the seller, an ex-Nokia employee who helped design the device), Nokia had plans to make a limited run of these as a tie-in with the 2009 Star Trek reboot.  The plans never came to fruition, for whatever reason, and only 12 prototypes were ever produced.  This is one of them, and I bid for and won it.

The device is obviously an early-generation Alpha-stage product - the reasons why are detailed in the video below.  Within two days of posting that video to YouTube, the story had been picked up by every major tech blog, from Gizmodo to Engadget.  We were getting almost 40,000 hits a day on this video alone.  That died down almost immediately, of course, but I still remember the excitement that came from "going viral."

Yes, I still have it.  And no, it's not for sale. :)