JANESVILLE, USA – This has to be the week for phones turning up in unusual places, as a Emma Schweiger got the surprise of her life when she reached into her bag of Clancy’s Ripple Potatoe chips only to find a Nokia 6810 perched inside. We’ve already written about the Nokia-chomping Cod and the phone-gobbling Buffalo, but a phone in a bag of crisps?The phone in question is a 6800 messaging device, with a fold-out keypad, first launched in 2003. The device supports GPRS, came with an FM tuner and a whopping 5MB of memory (how far we’ve come in six years!). Designed as a messaging device, the series 40-based 6800 came with an email client and the screen switched to landscape mode as soon as the extended keyboard was flipped open. The device actually picked up a Red Dot design award in 2003.
All that doesn’t explain its presence in a bag of potato crisps though. Ms Scheweiger said her heart jumped when she felt the device inside the bag, whilst reaching in for a handful of chips. Flipping between shock and bemusement, Ms Schewiger couldn’t get the device to turn on when she tried. It’s likely the phone will have been in the bag for a while, assuming it landed there during production so its likely the battery will have run down – in its day, the 6800 sported 240 hours battery life in standby mode.
The matter is now being investigated both by the supplier and the US Food and Drug administration. Meanwhile we’re hoping that’s the last “phone found in….” story for a while. Can we just look after our phones a little better please?
Photo from Gazette Extra