Day: 26 June 2017

At the moment retro could not be more current. The Mini NES bringing back retro gaming into the mainstream, Nokia re-release the most classic and iconic handset of all time – the Nokia 3310 – RetroPi bringing pretty much every game ever released for all the classic systems right into your living room!

Retro is so cool and everyone agrees, well everyone agrees until you use it. Forget gaming, because retro gaming is awesome, but what about the rest of it?  The truth is  – retro tech suffers, because technology moves on, when we go back to old tech we instantly think – “Wow, how did we cope with this?  It is so slow!”

Go back to the start of the mobile web, remember it?  Chances are you could be reading this post on a mobile device and thanks to 4G, and responsive web themes you can get the full enjoyment and all the information from this site and pretty much every other site on the internet on any device from one in the palm of your hand to another on a full 5K 27 inch screen!

Do you remember what we had for mobile devices before that?  (Tablets didn’t really exist at this point either). It was called WAP.  If it interests you you can read all about here : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol but basically this is what we had from 1999 to the late noughties. What happened next?  In a nutshell the iPhone happened (other operating systems popped up to, Symbian, Android…

From this HTML became accessible by handsets and then tablets (as we now know them) popped along.  Fast forward a little now we are right here, right now. 

And then back to the point of this post. We look back on all things retro with great nostalgia and think “how great was that iPhone”. Truth is it was great, but technology has moved on so much that those devices we hold so highly would now be unusable, if not unusable at least so frustratingly slow that we wouldn’t want to use them.  Out 2G original iPhone wouldn’t even be able to load this web site at any sort of useful speed, whereas with 4G it loads like lightning in glorious technicolor.  But our original iPhone was so cool and retro is cool. So here you go, here is the idea :
Here are the original iPhone backgrounds. Save them to your device and add them as your wallpaper. You now have the best of both worlds. The cool as hell retro backgrounds from the original iPhone, wrapped in the shell of an up to date and completely usable device. Let’s be honest that’s what we want anyway, the retro chic with the functioning of the latest tech. 

Now get back to your Mini NES and guide that little heroic plumber to save his bride. Oh and talking of which, when the Mini SNES is announced, get it preordered – it’s going to be in high demand. That’s my prediction for this Christmas anyway!