It is not a coincidence that the Ericofon, or the Cobra telephone as it is also called, has played a significant role in the history of the telephone. For a long time, phone manufacturers around the globe had dreamt about constructing a phone in one piece. Already in the 1930s, Siemens & Halske in Germany, had tried to construct such a phone, but the project did not get any further than a short test series. Instead, it was the Swedish company Ericsson that introduced the ground-breaking "all in one” phone on the market in 1956.

The Ericofon was an immediate success and six months after the telephone had been launched, orders exceeded production capacity by 500 percent. The Cobra telephone instantly became a sought-after design object. When the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in New York presented the 300 best-designed industrial products of the entire 20th century in the 1970s, the Kobra telephone was included and is today included in MoMA's collection.

The Ericofon marks a groundbreaking paradigm shift in phone design – before the Ericofon, phone devices were produced in heavy, black bakelite. It is also the first Swedish-made phone that was given a product name, rather than just a number or letter ID. With the Ericofon, the phone was seen more as a designer product than just an extension of the telephone.