Ericsson Dialog is a Swedish telephone model by Ericsson, released 1964. Millions of the model were sold and it retained its place in homes well into the 1990s. The Ericsson company presented King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden with a unique handmade Dialog telephone on his 40th birthday.
In the early 1960s the Swedish design company Acking, Olsson & Silow (AOS) received the most massive assignment of its history: the phone company Ericsson hired AOS to design Dialog, a new standard telephone that was to apply high end technology and reach international markets. Dialog attained great popularity and maintained its place within homes up until the 1990s. This design classic has become an object of desire amongst collectors and telephone enthusiasts. New technology and the increased liberties in form resulted in the end of the era of number disc telephones. Dialog's 1972 version equipped with buttons in place of the number disc never became as popular as its predecessor.
The Norgwegian telephone 11AB22 introduced by Elektrisk Bureau in 1967 used the same shell as Dialog, but had completely different electronics. The 11AB22 was the worlds first transistorized telephone, and unlike the Ericsson Dialog used an electronic ringer instead of bells, and was equipped with a dynamic microphone.
Due to the massive amount of telephones intended to be produced, uncommonly heavy emphasis was put on design. The exemplars for the future basic telephone of every home were Ericsson's own models from the 1930s. Dialog was to both be modern and follow Ericsson's design tradition. The ergonomics of the handle were focused on. Additionally acoustic, productional, and aesthetical questions needed to be solved.
The handle was accurately sized according to the regular face which had been taken as the starting point of the design process. In the completed product the distance between the mouth part and the ear part was noticeably shorter than earlier models. The handle was made as light as possible to minimise the stress inflicted upon the wrist and blood veins of the speaker during long calls. The weight of the base unit was also minimised especially due to logistic and packaging reasons. The number disc consisted of several parts and was designed so that it would be possible to replace with a set of buttons in the upcoming versions of the phone.
The depth and thoroughness of the design is perhaps best depicted by the fact that the inner lighting of the phone was one of the matters taken into account: the inside could not be left pitch dark in order to avoid insects inhabiting the product.
The material of the telephone shell is thermoplastic, specifically ABS . This granted new possibilities as to the form and colour of the product as well as made it very durable; the telephone can take heat and everyday use, though daylight tends to fade and yellow the colour.