Remember Mobile Phones?

[Captain Z]

Back in my day knock 'ere was something you did on yer mate's door if you wanted to speak to 'em!

[Captain Poodle Basher]

Possibly a Motorola v8160? They were tiny. It was my first mobile phone.

My second mobile phone. It replaced a Panasonic G600 which had a wonky battery so couldn't hold a charge. The Motorola didn't last more than a year when I fumbled getting it out of my pocket to answer a call and it bounced down the stairwell in work. I got an identical replacement which lasted for years and years until it just wore itself out.

It was replaced by a Siemens C45 which was the most hateful phone I ever owned. It took malicious delight in dropping a call by losing signal only to magically regain full strength moments later. The Fucker. Nearly cost me a job when I was waiting for a callback after an interview because it refused to answer calls made from a workplace extension.

[canadagoose]

I used to have a Nokia 3510 in high school, briefly. Used to be my Dad's and I got it once he got an upgrade. Years later I ended up using the same phone as a spare with an Orange SIM in it, because my parents wanted to be able to phone me for free and it needed to be an Orange number to do that. The days before unlimited minutes were ubiquitous, obviously.

The last phone I got before I got into smartphones was this, a Samsung C3050:



It wasn't too bad and had basic internet capabilities - just over GPRS / EDGE, mind, no 3G or Wi-Fi or anything. Had a terrible camera. The Samsung Galaxy Y that I got (as a present) after that was a fair upgrade, and even that was basic.

[Sherringford Hovis]

Anybody else have a Pogo around 2001-2? There were literally dozens of us reckoning we were Neo until the parent company went tits up in early 2003 while all you muggles had to wait till 2007 for your mobile internet touchscreenery.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Anybody else have a Pogo around 2001-2? There were literally dozens of us reckoning we were Neo until the parent company went tits up in early 2003 while all you muggles had to wait till 2007 for your mobile internet touchscreenery.

No I poured my money into the netbook craze but am glad I waited for an Acer Aspire One rather than blowing my wad on a square-screened eeepc like one compadre.

[touchingcloth]

A rich kid in school got a new phone and handed his old one over to me. It was that phone from The Matrix - the one where you could push a button to make the mouthpiece zoom out - and the kid was so rich that it can't have been more than a few months after the film had come out that he was happy to give it away for nowt.

Anyway, about 50% of the time the button would fling the mouthpiece out with such force it disconnected from the body of the phone and went skittering away across the floor.

[touchingcloth]

No I poured my money into the netbook craze but am glad I waited for an Acer Aspire One rather than blowing my wad on a square-screened eeepc like one compadre.

Eeeeeeeeepc was something I am so embarrassed to have owned that I haven't even volunteered it in the piece of shit laptop thread. Pathetic bit of kit.

[ZoyzaSorris]

Anybody else have a Pogo around 2001-2? There were literally dozens of us reckoning we were Neo until the parent company went tits up in early 2003 while all you muggles had to wait till 2007 for your mobile internet touchscreenery.

I had some colour touchscreen phone thing with folding keyboard - that you were supposed to use a pen with but I didn't bother - running some mobile windows bollocks, around 2003-4. Thought it was proper high tech. I could get proper internet and everything, and was planning on using it to cheat at pub quizzes but never bothered just like all of my other cunning plans

[Sebastian Cobb]

Eeeeeeeeepc was something I am so embarrassed to have owned that I haven't even volunteered it in the piece of shit laptop thread. Pathetic bit of kit.

I still have my aspire one. It was actually an alright machine once I binned off the really basic customised 'this is a crap browser and not much else'* version of linux with ubuntu which allowed me enough to learn how to work debian and cut the bloat.

The real thing that let it down after years of use was, although it actually filled its profile unlike the eeeeeeeeepc, that it had a low display resolution that hobbled website browsing, even the early google tablets outperformed it.

I often used it as a little terminal to a desktop pc with a bit more grunt that I hadn't really set up at a desk properly.

*chrome/azure os but 10+ years to early eh

In terms of 'i can buy this and use it as a normal computer' it was an absolute piece of shit though. What were they thinking?

I wasted countless hours making that thing a useable computer when I could've been less tight and bought a used thinkpad, dickhead.

[mothman]

It's literally ridiculous how many phones I've had at this point.

Nokia 3110 (still have this)
An Ericsson piece of shit
Nokia 7110 (and this)
Three or four other Nokias
An early Windows phone that wiped if it ran out of power
A BlackBerry
Motorola SLVR L7
Motorola RIZR Z8
About four or five iPhones

[purlieu]

Pre-smartphones I always had Nokias and they were built to last. The first was ludicrously big for the size, and I only had it because it was an early Bluetooth model and my first aborted year at uni I lived in a house with no internet, so I needed it to go online. I sold it and replaced it with a sensible sized model which lasted a few years. The next - an 1110 or 1112, I think - I managed to drop on the pavement / road dozens of times without damage. It was second hand and despite the dropping still lasted years. I replaced it with another second hand handset of the same model which lasted me right through to my first smartphone about four years later.  Amazing things and reminders of a simpler time when you weren't permanently connected to the internet.
My dad used his 3210 until his first smartphone in about 2012.

My iPhone 6S has been playing up since about six months after I bought it and I still have a year left on the contract.

[Steven88]

My entire phone history (unless i've forgotten any)

It took a depressingly long amount of time to remember them all and collate them, they might not be in the correct order either.

[Sebastian Cobb]

So is anyone going to cough to having one of the magic Phillips/Cellnet phones that stored the credit on the phone and with the addition of a magic little pic chip could just tell it that it had £10 credit every time you turned it on?

[Old Thrashbarg]

No mention of the Sony Ericsson W810i yet? The best of all the phones. Can't really think of any faults with it and if I was to ever eschew a touch screen phone I'd go back to that as soon as I could find one. Wish I could remember the forum I used to go on that had loads of Russians hacking around with SETool to enable all sorts of weird and wonderful features on it, including the ability to remove the network lock.

[touchingcloth]

No mention of the Sony Ericsson W810i yet? The best of all the phones. Can't really think of any faults with it and if I was to ever eschew a touch screen phone I'd go back to that as soon as I could find one. Wish I could remember the forum I used to go on that had loads of Russians hacking around with SETool to enable all sorts of weird and wonderful features on it, including the ability to remove the network lock.

I loved that phone. It was the last phone I had before I got a smartphone, and I carried on using it as an MP3 player after that.

The design of it was lovely - I loved the orange flashes, and the little translucent nub nest the bottom, and I remember the média controls being really nice to use - that was one benefit to it as an MP3 player compared to my smartphone at the time, as it was much easier to skip around tracks by feeling for buttons while it was in my pocket.

I used to get it out and play with it until the proprietary charger died and left it as a brick. I think I might still have it in a box somewhere.

I had both the black and white version of that phone, as well as a W350i which was the same thing but with a flippy mouthpiece.

I also loved my (pre-Sony) Ericsson T20e, which was a chunky little bombshell:

[phes]

Used to love this little Samsung flip phone. It had a bright LED in the corner so you could spot from across the room whether you had missed a call or message. Nowadays they want you staring at the phone every fucking minute of the day and wouldn't dream of including something that reduces engagement

[touchingcloth]

Used to love this little Samsung flip phone. It had a bright LED in the corner so you could spot from across the room whether you had missed a call or message. Nowadays they want you staring at the phone every fucking minute of the day and wouldn't dream of including something that reduces engagement

My Android spare phone has a small light that shows or blinks when there are notifications. I find it more irritating than useful now that there are more things than just texts and calls to be notified of, and in my search to find ways to disable it I think I found that it's part of the Android standard, so the days of LEDs rather than screens to alert you aren't dead yet.

iPhones don't really do this. I HATE any noises from my phone so it's always on silent, but if I need to have vibration switched off as well then I'll turn on the accessibility features for people with the deafs that blink the flashlight for alerts instead, which also means I need to keep the phone face down.

[mothman]

My entire phone history (unless i've forgotten any)

It took a depressingly long amount of time to remember them all and collate them, they might not be in the correct order either.

I kinda wish I'd done this now... what is third from left, top row? Def had one of those.

[phes]

My Android spare phone has a small light that shows or blinks when there are notifications. I find it more irritating than useful now that there are more things than just texts and calls to be notified

I only have messaging, calls and emails so it would help me. There are apps that will put a glowing dot on your screen but they don't work as well at distance as the old design

[phes]

I kinda wish I'd done this now... what is third from left, top row? Def had one of those.

3310 I think

[Steven88]

3310 I think

Yeah it's a 3310, I realised half way through that I should have labelled them.

[Ferris]

No mention of the Sony Ericsson W810i yet? The best of all the phones. Can't really think of any faults with it and if I was to ever eschew a touch screen phone I'd go back to that as soon as I could find one. Wish I could remember the forum I used to go on that had loads of Russians hacking around with SETool to enable all sorts of weird and wonderful features on it, including the ability to remove the network lock.

Forgot I had one of these little fuckers, remember very little about it (seem to recall everything was orange?) but it was billed as an MP3 player first which I quite liked.

[touchingcloth]

Did it have a white backlight (instead of the clumsy green effort of the 3310s)?

If so it was probably a Nokia 8310 or similar.



How on earth have I retained this information.

I had one of those. It had an IR port which would let you play two player snake against another phone, but I found that it would work to send HaHA CUNtS notes to the IR ports on the printers in the school IT lab.

[touchingcloth]

Forgot I had one of these little fuckers, remember very little about it (seem to recall everything was orange?) but it was billed as an MP3 player first which I quite liked.

Not just an MP3 player - it was branded as a Walkman.

[Ferris]

I had one of those. It had an IR port which would let you play two player snake against another phone, but I found that it would work to send HaHA CUNtS notes to the IR ports on the printers in the school IT lab.

Fucking hell that's right! You could line up the IR ports and fail to send ringtones or whatever.

That takes me back

[privatefriend]

Bought it from Woolworths, a real sex kitten.

[Sebastian Cobb]

My Android spare phone has a small light that shows or blinks when there are notifications. I find it more irritating than useful now that there are more things than just texts and calls to be notified of, and in my search to find ways to disable it I think I found that it's part of the Android standard, so the days of LEDs rather than screens to alert you aren't dead yet.

You can disable notifications on a per app basis, revoke anything that causes noise.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I had one of those. It had an IR port which would let you play two player snake against another phone, but I found that it would work to send HaHA CUNtS notes to the IR ports on the printers in the school IT lab.

Got a gameboy/gameboy color link cable when I was a kid, would've been good for multiplayer tetris but the world had moved on so I just plugged it in to battle some kid I didn't know at pokemon who kicked my arse and never used it again after that.

I reckon I should've probably seen that coming given I'd only just got pokemon blue, didn't really understand it and found it a bit shit and boring.

[touchingcloth]

Got a gameboy/gameboy color link cable when I was a kid, would've been good for multiplayer tetris but the world had moved on so I just plugged it in to battle some kid I didn't know at pokemon who kicked my arse and never used it again after that.

I reckon I should've probably seen that coming given I'd only just got pokemon blue, didn't really understand it and found it a bit shit and boring.

There was that N64 cable where you could link a GameBoy as a second screen. I think Majora's Mask used it to display maps, and Perfect Dark let you upload pictures from the camera as player faces.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I love stuff like that. Nintendo were wonderful for doing that sort of thing but also reducing it to near pointlessness because they knew they couldn't make something as expensive as a gameboy an essential part of game completion (although thinking about it, some of the high capacity n64 carts cost about as much as one).