Now that the Tomestone emote's been implemented in FFXIV...

[AurumWitch]

-how does the 'tomephone' fit into XIV lore? What does this say about tomestones in general? And can we get an answer from the lore team about this?

[Iscah]

I always figured they were something like a floppy disk. They don’t seem to have a screen on them, and must need a separate reader device.

So maybe it’s a portable reader? Something like a GameBoy (with the bulky ‘cartridge’ slot for tomestones) but with a touch screen like a smartphone.

[Sakuraluna]

I always thought it was some sort of memory stick.

[ObsidianFire]

Tomestones have been confirmed to be the Allagan version of USB drives. What Rowena is interested isn't the tomestones themselves, but the data stored on them. The Ironworks transcribes the data onto paper, translates it into modern Eorzean and sumarizes it for Rowena. She then sells the transcrips to collectors.You can find out more about this in the 60-70 SMN quests.

One amusing place you can see tomstones being used is in the Scavaen gear. The SMN/SCH books have Tomestones of Poetics, Creation, and Mendacity embeded in the inner cover. I don't know if they're functional acording to lore, but it makes a lot of sense for both those classes to keep all their math data close at hand.

[Fenral]

So maybe it’s a portable reader? Something like a GameBoy (with the bulky ‘cartridge’ slot for tomestones) but with a touch screen like a smartphone.

So... a VMU?

[Wyssahtyn]

The tomephone does not fit into XIV's lore. Tomestones are data storage devices, not communications devices. If you really insist on saying that it's a part of lore, then you should note that the emote in game specifically says that nothing happens when you activate it.

[Iscah]

One amusing place you can see tomstones being used is in the Scavaen gear. The SMN/SCH books have Tomestones of Poetics, Creation, and Mendacity embeded in the inner cover. I don't know if they're functional acording to lore, but it makes a lot of sense for both those classes to keep all their math data close at hand.

*goes to check*

Ah, that's interesting! So we can see them 'at correct scale' with our characters.

They're smaller than I thought they'd be.

I also actually took a look at the /tomestone emote, and I'm quite sure it's not supposed to be taken as canon. It has the same design as a poetics tomestone but it's the wrong size (if the others are correct), and also is literally a smartphone. It's not a clever in-universe equivalent, it's a smartphone with a screen and a home button and a camera on the back.

[Bright-Flower]

I don't really take it as canon that now a bunch of adventurers have the eorzean equivelant of smartphones but people can RP that they made one I guess.

[ObsidianFire]

My headcanon is that the tomestone readers that Rowena and the Ironworks have (how else are they going to find out what is on the Tomestones) where found in/around Mor Dhona. Which was the Allagan capital and has been around a long time. So they're the equivalent of slightly old desktop computers that wouldn't have been considered "state-of-the-art" by the end of the Allagan empire, but function just fine for the purposes of reading data.

The WoL has been to Azys Lla, where all the Allagan tech developers were. The odds of the WoL coming across "next-gen" Allagan tech is pretty high. I just figure they found the Allagan equivalent of a Galaxy S10. Which is to say, it does much, much more then read data, but that's probably all the WoL does with it.

[Enkidoh]

The 'smartphone' tomestone emote as an actual phone is kind of superflorous in the game's lore anyway as linkpearls already fill that role (they are literally phones in function, right down to using radio waves to transmit and recieve messages and having a phone-ringtone-like chirp in certain cutscenes when a npc is receiving a call.).

So I agree with Obsidian, the emote is basically just a tomestone reader and not an actual smartphone (I think we've kind of had enough smartphone placement in the FF series already with FFXV and it's ilk ), as linkpearls are already used for communication and serve the same purpose.