Students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, have created a phone that reads the content of webpages. Users simply look up the IP address of the website they want to access in a special cyber directory also produced by the students, dial the twelve-digit IP address using the nostalgic interface of the modernised rotary phone, and wait for the website to be read aloud in the receiver.

Users interested in experiencing different formats of The Internet Phone can opt for one of the four different mode tokens – article, developer, incognito and history. The latter reads content from the last five webpages visited; incognito functions like its browser counterpart and doesn’t store viewing history; developer reads from the website’s HTML; and the article token reads the website like a human, skimming for key sentences and phrases and omitting unimportant wording. To activate a mode, users need to unscrew the microphone cap in the receiver, and place a mode token inside.

Repurposing age-old items to reflect the modern digital way is an innovative method of bringing a product into the present. Two varied examples includes the new cassette player, and the smart wallet that doubles up as a charger and can also locate itself when lost. How would you use The Internet Phone?