Smartphones are great and wonderful in almost every way, but they’re also as needy as a newborn puppy — if you don’t feed them on electrons every night, they turn very quickly into useless hunks of glass. That’s why I am seriously excited for this credit-card-sized backup phone that you could slip into your wallet just in case.
The Talkase is pretty damn simple — a bog-standard 2G phone that can make and receive calls, text messages, and will live on standby for 100 hours (or, presumably, months with the battery turned off) whilst doing all of that. It takes a micro-SIM card, so you can swap in your smartphone SIM, or it also pairs to your main phone via Bluetooth to make a receive calls on a reasonably-sized screen, although that probably nukes the batter life.
At 5.5mm thick, it’s got a little more girth than your average credit card — but even then, I reckon it should go into most wallets without a problem. If you seriously object to pobcket bulge, though, it also ships with an iPhone case that lets you snap the mini-phone onto the back. Overall, it looks like a decent solution for travellers, or stupid, lazy idiots like myself who frequently leave home with their phones on one per cent because they like to live dangerously.
To get one, you’ll have to head over to — you guessed it! — Kickstarter, and stump up $US35 for just the phone and one case, or $US39 for two. Fingers crossed that this actually turns into reality, because I’d totally want one of these for my wallet. [Kickstarter]