I rocked a Samsung Alias 2 for 4 years before I got an iPhone 5. The e-ink keyboard was awesome how it changed when you flipped the screen open to portrait or landscape.
Nit sure what it was called, but I’m pretty sure that not only it’s the last Qwerty keyboard phone i used, it’s also one of the last phone Nokia sold in my country.
My “iPod Classic”, for all its faults, had survived going under a bus’s wheel unscathed and falling off my bike at speed a few times before I finally consigned it to the box of electronic stuff I wasn’t going to take with me when I emigrated three years ago. The Gameboy colour’s in the cupboard as I type! I might even bring it with me when society collapses and I have to forage.
I don’t know, the last one was maybe a Motorola clamshell, but from the “old” ones I had a Bosch GSM909, yes, they made phones. Barely usable and horribly expensive to use. But it had a blue 2 line display. A BLUE DISPLAY. Woooooow.
N95 was my phone when my friend got the iPhone One. I remember uselessly arguing that my N95 also played videos and music and all that iPhone stuff as well… Except, it was so fucking slow to take videos.
I remember standing in the street and seeing a massive huge brawl outside of a pub, loads of people doing all sorts of crazy shit and I was standing there desperately trying to record a video while the shitty, sluggish N95 missed it all.
That experience really scarred me because now I’m obsessed with the absolute quick-draw features of modern phones - like the Google Pixel.
I will say… I kinda miss the T9. but I might be alone in that. lol. I feel like they used some kind of beefed up T9 software for symbian. specifically to use in the Nseries phones. but I am not 100% certain.
I just remember that texting was never an issue and I could do it fast with the T9.
Does that qualify as a dumb phone though? Symbian could do a lot more, and better, in the area of productivity tools, multitasking, customization and apps management than android/iOS did, and for a very long time. The form factor wasn’t putting as much emphasis on the screen real estate but that doesn’t make it less smart.
I’d say it was a “smart phone” and not a “smartphone”. It, and other Symbian phones like it, existed before the iPhone came out and made touchscreen smart phones a thing. Basically a PDA + Phone.
Even Samsung had a colour touchscreen before iPhone but no one saw it as the first “smartphone”. The iPhone was the ‘first’ true smartphone though you could argue several others before it were smartphones. But I’d class them as “smart phones”.
That may be your opinion, but if you follow my Wikipedia link, it says it’s a smartphone, so I’m not even going to argue. Wikipedia has a widely accepted definition of a smartphone.
The last phone I had before I got an Android phone was an LG EnV2. I still have the thing, it still turns on though no networks support it and the battery is toast. Sometimes I just hold it in my hand for a few minutes because it’s just such a nicer thing to interact with than my S10e.
I don’t really count it as a “dumb phone” though. I had some Samsung slider before that that really was a “Camera phone.” Effectively no web browser, no app ecosystem at all, you could barely get the pictures it took out of it. The EnV2 was USB, there were games and things you could get for it, it had some email and web capability.
Then I got my LG Ally phone running some android version from before they started naming them after sweets, and it’s all been downhill from there.
you could barely get the pictures it took out of it.
Ugh. I had some kind of old Samsung flip phone in the late 2000’s and I had a picture on it of my ATV hanging upside down in the top of a tree. Easily 20m high. But I had trouble getting the pic off the phone, and now the phone is long gone.
Nokia n95 is a smartphone, not a dumb phone. It has Symbian OS, you can install apps, copy/paste, browse internet. I used to have the 8gb one, it has more capabilities than the first iPhone.
Yep, it was a great phone and I had it as my last too. Not a smartphone in our current understanding, but still close to a dumb phone and with great functionality. Can’t remember what happened to mine, but my dad got it reconditioned and used it for a while after me until he got a modern smartphone too
Best phone ever. I read through whole libraries on that little thing, and it looks so futuristic (as long as you don’t look at the 500 pixel screen or the 140p camera)
Nokia N75. It was an upgrade from a Sony Ericsson hand-me-down after my invincible Nokia was thrown out of the window of my car as it was being stolen (I called it and the thief answered… long story).
The N75 had a 2mp camera and MP3 playing, but tiny storage and I got a free iPod (the touch wheel one) with a college powebook around the same time. I used the N75 online once, to locate a restaurant one time, and it probably cost my $3-5 since I had no data plan.
This was a right before the iPhone 3G would make those affordable and launch the App Store. I bought that for my wife and we never went back.
Technically, but it was useless for any of the things that we use in smart phones. It had terrible web browsing, no GPS. Very few apps outside of games. T9 typing (which should have disqualified it in the first place). It was a camera phone that they tried to upsell as a smartphone and a big part of why Nokia lost so much market to Apple and later Android.
Smartphones used to have a different purpose than they do now. Just because it doesn’t have a querty keyboard, doesn’t mean it’s not a smartphone. Just look at the first iPhone, it’s just as useless, it didn’t even have the ability to install apps (imo it’s a must for smartphones) , yet hardly anyone will dispute whether it was a smartphone.
iPhone had gps and mapping and really nice full website browsing, plus bigger storage and music (since we all wanted iPod phones before then).
I’d argue one of the bigger factors in its success was that it had an unlimited data plan (which I never should have let go of).
The N75 may have had Bluetooth, the OS, and a browser, but lacked the UI to use it. It was a camera phone marketed as a smartphone because it launched right after the first iPhone.
I never used N75, but i had n95, and they’re both running Symbian OS so I assume they were similar at least in software. I had full website browsing (made faster thanks to opera mini), email, file manager. I also had third party apps like Skype, Google maps (doesn’t matter whether you have gps), Gmail. If that’s not a smartphone then I don’t know what is.
Even the wiki you linked to clearly defines it as a smartphone. Why would you argue with that?
I wish phones would go back to being unique. I want a slider with a physical keyboard (like the HTC EVO Shift). My Pixel 6 Pros battery is showing wear already but there’s nothing on the market I feel is worth switching to.
I loved the early galaxies and the zero lemon batteries. They were ridiculously cheap, so you could have like 3 charged at any time. Then if you ever got robbed you could just say “e-waste!” And toss a dead battery at your assailants eyes.
Exactly - phones used to last! I also dropped my w810i a few times but it never broke. Great little phone. In fact I’m gonna charge mine to have a play on it. I think it had an MP3 player too!
It was still working back then, I changed because i was getting tired of typing on the small keys. I could type without looking, this was pretty cool ! All of the key had worn off anyway 😂
A other happy v630i user here. Don’t know how many years I spent all in all, but I used it for everything. Even remember loading some books as text files, and reading quite a lot on its tiny screen during the longer bus rides.
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