Anti-smartphone space engineer builds cell phone with rotary dial

That takes old-school to a new level.

A space engineer who despises smartphones and text messaging built her own cell phone -- and it has a rotary dial.

Justine Haupt, 34, spent three years creating the cute device, which has a battery that lasts up to 30 hours, according to report in SWNS. The phone, which is 4 inches tall, 3 inches wide and about 1 inch thick, takes an AT&T prepaid SIM card that's compatible with cell phone radio.

Public interest in her writing about the retro phone apparently crashed her website.

Haupt, who works as an astronomy engineer at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, has since been inundated with requests from fellow smartphone haters begging for their own version of the phone and she is now offering build-it-yourself kits, SWNS reports.

“I work in technology but I don’t like the culture around smartphones,” she told SWNS. “I don’t like the hyper connected thing. I don’t like the idea of being at someone’s beck and call every moment and I don’t need to have that level of access to the Internet."

The engineer used a 3D printer to create the cell phone case and added speed dialing buttons so she could call her husband and her mother at the click of a button. She also added an e-paper display to the phone so that she could see messages and missed calls.

She wasn't planning on selling the phones, but Haupt ended up creating a kit that users can use to put together their own version of the tiny phone -- minus the rotary dial, although a newer kit will be more inclusive -- after being inundated with emails from people who wanted to purchase the phone.

“It is actually my phone - I don’t carry my flip phone with me anymore," Haupt said. "I never expected to go viral with this."

“But there’s a surprising number of people who have identified with my philosophy of not liking smartphone culture -- I’m pleasantly surprised that those people are out there," she added.