Another obsolete payphone - with SMS no less

While there were many, many cell phones and relatively few pay phones visible on the streets in Moscow, I did see this interesting pay phone in a booth about three blocks from Lubyanka Square.

What's interesting are the SMS and email capabilities.  Here's a close up:

According to a quickie translation by Russian friends here in the US, the upper left button allows you to select voice prompts in Russian or English.  The second button down allows you to compose and send SMS text messages, the third allows you to retrieve voice mail and the 4th allows you to compose and send e-mail messages.  Since the numeric keys have only Roman lettering, not Cyrillic, presumably one can only compose SMS and emails with Roman characters.

In any event, the narrow window of opportunity for this phone appears to have passed as mobile phones are widespread while I never saw anyone use a payphone during the 11 days I spent in greater Moscow.

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Note:  There are more than 250 other pictures from Moscow here, but most are likely only of interest to me...  :-)

Comments

[Mark Tearle]

It's an Amper phone made in Spain

http://www.worldpayphones.com/units/unit-oz-amper.htm

Standard Payphone in Australia for several years, SMS for at least the past few.