Print advertising for digital technology always ages in fascinating ways, but the advertisement for The Callshop at the top of page 37 is a particularly potent dose of tech nostalgia. Located on the Nieuwe Ebbingestraat, this shop marketed itself as the “GSM Reparatie Specialist van het Noorden” (GSM Repair Specialist of the North).
To truly appreciate this ad, you have to look at the specific brands they boast about repairing: Apple, Blackberry, HTC, Nokia, and Samsung. In early 2013, the smartphone wars were still fiercely competitive. Blackberry was desperately clinging to its corporate user base with physical keyboards, and HTC was producing some of the most beautiful Android phones on the market. The ad also prominently features a service that was a massive part of early 2010s mobile culture: “Simlockvrij maken v.a. €10” (SIM unlocking from €10). Back then, telecom providers aggressively locked phones to their specific networks, forcing consumers to visit local tech shops to hack their devices just to switch carriers.
Advertising a phone repair shop in a football programme made perfect sense. The stadium was full of thousands of people holding fragile, expensive glass rectangles. A dropped phone during a goal celebration meant a trip to the Nieuwe Ebbingestraat on Monday morning.
A Look into the Future
Viewed from 2026, this advertisement is a graveyard of tech empires. Blackberry and HTC have effectively vanished from the global smartphone market, and Nokia’s mobile division is a shadow of its former self, leaving a duopoly of Apple and Samsung. Furthermore, the practice of SIM-locking phones was largely outlawed or abandoned across the European Union, killing the lucrative “unlocking” market entirely. The local “Callshops” that survived had to evolve into highly sophisticated micro-soldering centers, fixing complex motherboard issues rather than just punching in unlock codes.