The proprietor of a little store off George Street in Sydney’s central business district, nestled between a phone repair shop and a shop selling reconditioned computers, has a shelf that isn’t featured on the internet. It contains three sealed boxes, among other things. The product photography on the front has that specific early-2000s graphic design aesthetic—many diagonal angles, silver gradients, and the word “GPS” presented like a trophy—and the cardboard and plastic wrap are still intact. Each box contains an identical E-TEN Glofiish that was manufactured in Taiwan sometime in 2006 or 2007. The proprietor is aware of their possessions. He’s not eager to sell.
The Glofiish was never sold in large quantities. The Taiwanese manufacturer, E-TEN, created it for enterprise power users, or those who required their phone to run Windows Mobile 6, synchronize with an Exchange server, navigate using an integrated SiRF GPS chipset, and launch Pocket Excel as necessary. Serious productivity tools aimed at a serious professional audience included the X500, the M700 with its actual slide-out keyboard, and the X800 with its VGA display. Few of them were sold. Additionally, nearly all of the initial retail inventory was deemed unworthy of preservation due to the small initial retail volumes and the fact that Windows Mobile was essentially outdated after two years of these devices’ shipment.
Any collector market that now exists is built on that exclusivity. There must be a very small number of surviving sealed units for an item to have collector value in its original, factory-sealed state. That criteria is convincingly met by the Glofiish. January 2007 saw the release of the iPhone. The market had mostly given up on Windows Mobile by 2009 in favor of iOS and Android. Unsold inventory was discounted or thrown out by retailers. The sold devices were utilized until they broke down, at which point they were discarded. The sealed boxes that have survived are extremely unusual because they were accidentally overlooked by the regular market procedures that destroy everything else, not because anyone was attempting to preserve them.
For the past ten years or more, the market for sealed video games—original Nintendo cartridges and consoles in immaculate original packaging—has been the main driver of the collector dynamic surrounding antique technology. These items are frequently priced at rates that would startle anyone who hadn’t been following the industry. Scarcity, historical position, the nostalgic appeal of holding a tangible artifact from a time that most people experienced but few documented, and the desire to own something that existed at a transitional point in cultural or technological history are the mechanisms driving that market, and they apply fairly consistently to other technology objects. The Glofiish is situated at precisely that kind of turning point. Constructed to the fullest extent possible just as the pre-touchscreen smartphone paradigm was about to be superseded, it was the best that the paradigm could provide.
This type of material has a specific market in Sydney. During the mid-2000s, Australia imported a significant portion of Asian consumer electronics, including niche brands that were more widely available in the Asia-Pacific region than in the European or American markets. Thru these channels, some Glofiish stock made its way to Australian specialty merchants. Over the past few years, some of that stock—whether returned, unsold, or just forgotten in back rooms—has emerged in the vintage and antique technology market. Dealers who are familiar with the category have been purchasing as it emerges and keeping rather than swiftly switching, indicating that they think the price trajectory is still rising.
