I don’t mean BETTER. That’s a different conversation. I mean cooler.
An old CRT display was literally a small scale particle accelerator, firing angry electron beams at light speed towards the viewers, bent by an electromagnet that alternates at an ultra high frequency, stopped by a rounded rectangle of glowing phosphors.
If a CRT goes bad it can actually make people sick.
That’s just. Conceptually a lot COOLER than a modern LED panel, which really is just a bajillion very tiny lightbulbs.
Cell phones, when they had personality. The 2000s was such a good time for them, you had so many designs. Slide out keyboard, panels that can slide, sleek designs, some had actual buttons .etc
But we’re now relegated to just a varying series of rectangles and squares. Yay…
I got one that slid up to reveal the keyboard after watching The Matrix, and I thought it was the coolest phone ever. I still have it, and I still think it is pretty cool.
Edit: it’s not an actual keyboard though, it’s a phone keypad for dialing or sending texts with t9 input.
It was the Samsung A737.
It looks like this closed
And here it is open
I fell in love with slide phones after watching Densha Otoko!
Pictures under glass: literally the only affordance anyone has now for device interaction
Somebody answer the phone
Mine folds in half, so that’s kinda cool