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.
I also had the alias 2. I thought I was pretty hot shit with the fancy flip-both-directions phone. And I think there was a little display on the outside too, right? With the time and some other basic notifications?
This small form factor running Android would be very cool! Despite a small screen, it’d probably work well enough since you wouldn’t have a software keyboard taking up 50% of the screen real estate. The e-ink keyboard is a good compromise of having dynamic changing keys but still have the tactile feedback.
That little camera module looks like it actually took decent pics based on the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Verrazano-Bridge-Dawn.jpg on the wiki. Esp considering it’s from 2002.
It did, but note that the linked picture is the full resolution of the camera. Also, the phone had very limited storage space, and the display was in no way suitable for displaying the pictures taken, so you just hoped for the best until you managed to check them on your computer.
The S55 got lost eventually, but the camera module should still be around here somewhere.
This is a bit of a story, and depending on how you define it, I have gone back and forth between dumb and smart phones before I finally Settled on iPhone with the 5S
My first phone was a Nokia 3330, great phone, worked well, a bit too well for my parents liking when I found the wireless access protocol feature, and bruned 100sek on useless, slow internet access back in 2001 or so…
Later, I think I managed the impossible and broke my phone, and got my dads old Nokia 8210, that was extremely tiny, and really cool.
Dropped that in the snow and lost it.
Got a Sony Ericsson K700i, cool design, pretty useless phone, I lost it at home for months, and switched to my grandmothers old Nokia 5110, I meassured it against a real brick in the walls of my school, it was two thirds the size of the brick, found my K700i, but the joystick never really worked, so…
I got a Sony Ericsson K800i! That was a beast, awesome camera, rugged as hell, and super reliable, it was the first phone I had that had a usable music player, I had a large memory stick card that I filled with music, and just jammed, I broke so many 3.5mm adapters…
Then I got what I would describe as a smartish feature phone, the Nokia 5800, I even ran Putty on it to connect with a friend’s Linux server and get on IRC with screen irssi! The phone was a touch phone, but resistive touch, so I needed a stylus, the music player was annoying, but the sound from the speakers, wow, it had BASE, and actually sounded good! I could even access Youtube on it, was brilliant on WiFi!
But the 5800 started deteriorating, and I had just got my first job, with my first paycheck I splashed the cash hard, and bought, what was my first smart phone, it was beutiful, had a fold out keyboard with a Swedish keyboard, a capacitive touchscreen, HDMI out, and it was mine. I had bought myself the amazing Nokia E7, can you believe it? A real Nokia E7! It was as badass as you could get back then, I felt like a complete hacker when I ran Putty on it with the keyboard folded out, I had even set up touch gestures to navigate irssi by swiping!
That phone got pickpocketed.
I could not afford to replace my E7 at the time, so I bought a Nokia Asha 300, it was crap, but worked well enough.
Now, at that time, I had a spare sim from an old mobile broadband I used in a temp apartment, it had unlimited data…
So I got a second phone!
I found a used Nokia E72, new in box, my dad had used one, and I liked the look of it, so I bought it from a reputable used phone dealer, and used it as mobile entertainment device, I could access youtube, even on the super tiny screen I got enjoyment out of the 144p video, but what I most enjoyed was internet radio, specifically, SLAYradio, an internet radio station only playing C64 remixes, that often can legally be downloaded for free, and I got so much music that way!
A few years later, I had got rid of the 300, and was using my E72 as my main phone, three days after gettibg a new job snd getting the final paycheck rom my last job, my E72 screen broke, so I got on the iPhone train with the S5
Yes, during the time when I had the Asha 300, I also carried several Android tablets, I also tried to switch to Android after my second iPhone, an iPhone SE (the original model), as I saw that Nokia had made a beutiful and fairly affordable Android phone, the 6.1
I ran it for two months, untill I dropped it and completely obliterated the screen, then I saw that I would have to send the phone away, and just gave up and went back to my iPhone SE.
One feeling I have allways had when it comes to Android, is that it feels like Google constantly is looking over my shoulder watching what I do, I don’t get that feeling on my iPhone, that doesn’t mean that Apple isn’t watching me constantly, but the feeling is different.
Sony Ericsson W810i. Got it in 2007, I think. When it started to die on me in late 2009 i replaced it with an iPhone 3G, which was my first apple phone. It was also my last apple phone as I hated how locked down everything was.
EDIT: I just remembered I had a secondary dumbphone around 2012 or thereabouts. It was a dual SIM nokia of some sort that I used mainly as a backup phone in case my main ran out of battery while I was on the move.
I had a Sony Ericsson too as my last dumb phone but I don’t remember the model. I just remember it slides out to reveal the number pad and that it was great for music.
I had the phone pictured in the post. I even activated the browser. It was 100% trash. WAP sites and browsers were nothing like even the first iPhone. That’s what made the iPhone such a shock, no one had browsed the web like that on a phone before and it was, no exaggeration, a game changer.
As for the camera the first iPhone camera was garbage comparatively but still was better than most if not all flip phones. I have picture back from when I had that phone pictured in the post and they are a grainy mess.
Well yeah, things improved. I guess the real difference is that the smart phone is actually a mobile general purpose computing device, which, by the way, also makes a call. My reason for buying iPhone 1 was to combine two devices in one - iPod and mobile phone. I did not expect that e-mail, web browsing and camera were so good. But the real game changer was an App Store, which came later.
I had the James Bond edition of Sony Ericsson C902. The camera was nice but the UI had frame rate issues. I came from a brown SE K770i which was buttery smooth. From C902 I went to Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, my first touchscreen phone and first Android where I learned about apps, OS updates, fustom ROMs, etc. What a fantastic phone that was.
Add comment