After resurrecting an iconic PC brand, Commodore is getting into flip phones

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 right where the original Commodore left off. Which meant starting product development in the mid-1990s. Simpson and his team first set to work reviving the company’s most iconic product, and you can now buy a Commodore 64 that is the spitting image of the 1982 original (other than the Wi-Fi connectivity, the USB ports, and a few other slightly modern niceties). It’s a pure nostalgia play, and by most accounts a very good one. Commodore says it has sold 30,000 of them since last year. After that, things began to get hypothetical. The turn of the 21st century was the beginning of the cellphone era, when companies like Nokia ruled the technological world. Simpson found himself asking: What would Commodore have done? Made a phone, surely. “I think they would have followed Apple,” Simpson tells me, “and ultimately released an iPhone. Or, at least, a phone. Every other company did.” The new Commodore is now getting ready to ship the phone the original Commodore never dreamed of. It’s called the Callback 8020, it’s a flip phone, and it starts at $499. With features and colors straight out of the early aughts, Simpson seems to hope it can once again satiate people’s gadget nostalgia, while also providing an answer to a very 2026 problem: We’re all on our phones too much. …