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.
God that phone sucked. It was so slow. I always wondered why Gameboy could be so damned fast, yet a phone with a much more powerful soc struggled just to bring up my contacts? They needed video game devs making the phone OS.
A Nokia 5310, before moving over to a ZTE blade gen1. Really liked the XpressMusic phones, and their proper headphone out and proper signal levels when using it. Trying to use the aux on car stereos with any following smartphones before my current Xperia 5 III was hopeless, since the maximum voltage levels were so low you had to turn the amplifier volume up to 11 just to hear anything…
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.
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.
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