You may have the best of the smartphones, but you gotta love the old vintage phone that was your first. A classic flip phone or just a resilient brick that won’t crack no matter where you hit it. You might have kept one or two of your favorites, but a Slovakian collector has enough to open up a museum.
Stefan Polgari has a collection of over 3,500 phones of 1,231 different models. The 26-year-old tech head belongs to the small town of Dobsina in Slovakia. Polgari started doing reviews of old phones online at the age of 15 which gathered him a small phone collection of Nokia, Alcatel, Sagem, Ericsson, and some other brands available in Slovakia. It was not until two years ago that Stefan’s collection spiked when he bought someone else’s old collection of a thousand phones for a few thousand Euros. Ever since then he started looking for missing models of phones to add to his collections. About half of the 3,500 ancient phones that Stefan owns are still functional.
Stefan was motivated to build a collection of old phones due to his fascination with the evolution of technology, particularly in the mobile phone arena. The variety of phones is huge and includes the most basic of the phones Nokia 3310, the early Nokia slide phones slide and fold keyboard phones, and even the early touchscreen phones.
Stefan did not commit the cruelty of keeping his rich collection to himself. He turned the attic of his home in Dobsina into a mobile phone museum where he built red painted wooden shelves to showcase the phones arranged on the basis of their design.
For his cellphone museum, Stefan was awarded a certificate by the Slovakian Book of Records recognizing his collection as the largest in the country.
While his collection is the largest in the country, it is not the biggest in the world. It trails closely behind the German collection owned by Carsten Tews, who won a Guinness World Record for his collection of 1,563 different models of phones. His collection, however, was not solely vintage unlike Stefan’s. It only features 14 brands of phones none of which are the fancy ones like HTC. The brands include Alcatel, Sagem, Siemens, ZTE, Ericsson, Samsung, Trium, Nokia, Panasonic, Motorola, Mitsubishi, Bosh, Sony-Ericsson, and Philips.
If you want to visit the museum, you can schedule a visit on his website.
