Commodore’s Callback 8020 is a retro phone with modern ideals

When Christian Simpson, a retro gaming YouTuber also known as Peri Fractic, bought the remains of an early PC company called Commodore in 2025, he decided to pick up where the original Commodore left off. Which meant starting product development in the mid-1990s. Simpson and his team initially set to work on reviving the company’s most popular product, and now you can Buy Commodore 64 This is the original photo from 1982 (other than the Wi-Fi connectivity, USB ports, and some other slightly modern details). It’s a pure nostalgia play, and by most accounts a very good play. Commodore says it has sold 30,000 of them since last year.

After that, things started going virtual. The turn of the 21st century marked the beginning of the mobile phone era, when companies like Nokia ruled the technology world. Simpson found himself wondering: What would the Commodore do? It definitely made a phone. “I think they would follow Apple and eventually release an iPhone,” Simpson tells me. “Or at least, a new one.” phone. Every other company did.

The new Commodore is now preparing to ship a phone that the original Commodore never dreamed of. It’s called the Callback 8020, and it’s a foldable phone, and it starts at $499. With features and colors straight out of the early 2000s, Simpson seems to be hoping it can once again satiate people’s nostalgia for gadgets, while offering an answer to the problem of 2026: we’re all using our phones too much.

It’s not an impressive piece of PC hardware, but it’s not really trying to be. It has a 3.25-inch, 480 x 640 display on the inside, a MediaTek Helio G81 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, a headphone jack, and an FM radio antenna. Retro styles read “retro”; The spec sheet says “maybe a little slow”.

Philosophically, the Callback has a lot in common with devices like the Light Phone, and tries to strike the same delicate balance between giving people all the features they need and exactly nothing else. “This is really the phone call between stupid and smart,” Simpson says. It blocks social media and web browsers entirely; The phone is not even allowed to access Facebook’s servers. Since the device runs a version of Jolla’s privacy-focused Sailfish OS, it can technically run almost any Android app.

Instead of trying to guess exactly what users want, Commodore’s plan is to build an allowlist system, through which users can request that an Android app be added to the Callback store, and a combination of AI and human reviewers will decide what’s acceptable. (And of course, for everything else there’s sideloading.) Simpson seems to be game for adding things like Uber and Spotify, and is perfectly willing to prevent time-wasters like Slack and Gmail from ending up in a callback.

Commodore envisions the Callback as a phone for nights and weekends to get away from all the work apps and notifications. The entire phone is designed to be quieter: it has five colorful LEDs that glow when you have a notification, instead of buzzing in your pocket. The phone’s external display only shows the time, date, battery level, and connection status. You can take photos with the 48-megapixel camera, send messages via old-school T9 voice or typing, listen to music with an “audiophile-grade” DAC and included headphones, make calls, and not much else.

The standard Callback model comes in beige, white and silver. There’s also a very nice translucent blue model for $549.99, and a gold “Founders Edition” model for $640. Commodore’s plan is to start shipping phones by the end of this year, and Simpson seems confident it can accomplish that even as the supply of RAM and other components shrinks. “We’ve built a pricing buffer,” he says. “And if we don’t use this buffer, it allows us to offer a discounted launch price instead.” The starting price is a little high for a second phone, but Commodore’s timing is actually pretty good. More and more people are looking for a way to get off their smartphones, and 2000s nostalgia is back in full swing. Maybe it’s truly Commodore time again.