These minutes are the "basic rate" to landlines and ordinary mobile phones around the world.
If they were ordinary phones our Asiatic pals could listen in on us.
Nor, they say, would they have been recorded over an ordinary phone in the sheriff's office.
I don't like to trust to ordinary phones.
"That phone uses more juice than an ordinary cellular phone, you've only got about four minutes talk time between charges."
But off premises, the pocket phone operates as an ordinary cellular phone.
It's a telephone, but this is not an ordinary phone.
It was an ordinary black phone with no scrambler attachment.
A new generation of wireless phones could in time compete directly with ordinary phones.
"The battery in an ordinary cellular phone is as big as our whole wrist phone," he said.