Maintaining a phone museum... it's harder than it looks!

I/you/someone decides to set up a phone museum. Well, I guess it depends on how many phones/smartphones we're talking about. Most of us have a batch of previous phones, sitting in a drawer, but it becomes a collection when you start organising them, cataloguing them, and then... maintaining them.

For it to be notable, there has to be a point to such a collection, of course. I've been collecting, in a way, old smartphones since 2000, this being my work until I retired recently. But my passion was always for the Symbian OS-based devices, from Nokia Communicators through to the Nokia 808, via the likes of the Sony Ericsson P series. 

So, ignoring other classics in my possession (e.g. Windows Phones), I settled on properly organising and cataloguing a 'Symbian museum'. For my own enjoyment and for others. Including a load of relevant background content, clear photos of all the devices in use, and with my own (ahem) expert comment on what made each phone so good or so bad(!)

Many others have tried different angles, I'm sure. I'll bet there's a Blackberry museum or two, plus a Palm OS one, and of course my friend Ben Wood has the definitive Mobile Phone Museum, which avoids limitations by simply collecting every phone ever made(!) Plus there are a lot of YouTubers and tech reviewers (like me in the past, I guess) who simply amass devices that were sent in for review and just never recalled. 

Which brings me to maintenance. I remember Arun Maini (MrWhoseTheBoss on YouTube) showing how some of the phones stacked in his display cabinet had been ruined by their Lithium-Ion batteries self-discharging and then catastrophically swelling. To my knowledge, none of these old, old internal batteries have ever exploded, but it's not a pleasant thought to think of some kind of thermal runaway. In most cases, a swollen battery is as bad as it gets.

But how does one avoid such swollen batteries (whether internal or - with the oldest examples - swappable)? By turning them on every once in a while and charging them back up, ideally to 80%+. Many devices will have different charging connectors and other quirks, making the job slightly harder, but the need is there.

I did ask Ben about this when he was on the PSC podcast and he said that he wasn't doing anything about the issue and hoped it wouldn't be a problem. To be fair, like me, once a device has been catalogued and photographed and written up, you could argue that it's 'in' the collection, at least digitally, and that the current swollen/non-operational state of the actual hardware right now is less important.

But I'm different and I want the option of powering most of my collection now, in 2026 (as I write this). To play with the interface, perhaps do a video, even install some of my own old applications and games and relive old memories. 

So, roughly every six months, I get the ENTIRE collection/museum out and set up various chargers, turn each phone on and check the battery charge state. Anything below 50% gets topped up past 80%. This takes time and effort, usually around a full day (though of course I can do other chores while things are accepting energy)!

Am I being a little obsessive? Possibly. But, having collecting near-mint examples of absolute classics like the Nokia 9300i (on the left in the photo), wouldn't it be a shame to have it not turn on simply because I left it in a drawer for a couple of years and the battery went bad?

Thoughts welcome! The full museum is here online and also shown off in powered-down form in the brief video below: