Re: "Genie" telephone
Well I happen to have a DTMF Genie phone, so there's at least one in the UK. I bought it in the USA - they weren't originally sold here, as far as I know.
At first glance, it looks like the British Telecom Genie phone, but the 'dial' has * and # buttons as well as the digits 0-9. The BT version sometimes had Secrecy and Last Redial functions in place of the * and # keys; sometimes those two extra buttons were left blank, depending on the model. The American version has no secrecy or redial functions either. Also the BT version has their logo - the 'T' in a circle - in the centre of the dial. On the American version, it's blank.
On the base, mine says manufactured by American Telecommunications Corp. and is dated 1983. I assume the British Genie phones were made under licence from ATC, but with a new PCB designed for loop disconnect signalling (residential phone lines that supported DTMF were rare in UK in the early 1980s).
I always thought "InPhone" referred to British Telecom's range of designer / fashion phones. The word "In" is sometimes used to denote something that's trendy or fashionable. The idea was that customers could unplug their old phone and replace it with something more fashionable whenever they wanted, unlike the old GPO days when phones were hard-wired and only a few standard designs were available. Ultimately, this turned the telephone into a throwaway object.
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