Old Mobile Phones
Now I spent two hours just looking at semi-recent videos of such, also because I became invested in it - the nostalgia really hit hard.
I didn't have a mobile phone until very late in my life, when smartphones long since established themselves as the standard, so the early mobile phone crazy went by mostly unnoticed by me - but I remember them still a bit fondly, since I was exposed to them in Asian media like South Korean movies, but also in animes.
And when I finally got my first mobile phone, a cheap smartphone, it was, like it always is for me, more out of curiosity for the technology than to connect with others.
And now, so many years later, it repeats in a way: Yet again I am curious, but my curiosity takes me back, for a technology I didn't care for when it was actually relevant.
Since I am a Sony fan, or at least a fan of Sony of old, I quickly pivoted to the Sony Ericsson line and found some really interesting looking models attached below.
But it's a shame older mobile phones simply won't work in a lot of first world countries anymore, because of the shutdown of the 2G networks.
If you have any fond memories regarding this topic, please feel free to share them!
#technology #phones #nostalgia #personal #sony
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Old Mobile Phones
@okabe_rintarou My first phone was a Samsung Brightside feature phone back in 2012. I was in middle school at the time and most of everyone had move on to smartphones. I went from the only kid without a cell phone to the only kid without a smartphone.
It was actually a weird time where feature phones tried to be like smartphones without actually being smartphones. To the point that they look like them but still ran dumb phone OSes.
I never really used it for anything other than calling my parents to pick me up and for a cheap MP3 player.
My first smartphone ended up being a refurbished Samsung Galaxy S3 around 2015.
re: Old Mobile Phones
>It was actually a weird time where feature phones tried to be like smartphones without actually being smartphones.
Looking at photos from the Samsung U380 Brightside you mentioned: Indeed. But it looks kind of fun, but maybe that's just the tech archeologist inside me speaking.
Do you have any fond feelings towards it? Was it fun to use? The keyboard certainly looks appealing and it looks like it could be pleasantly hefty. Were there any themes (the orange theme in the photos is a bit hard on my eyes)? Did you try to browse on the internet with it?
I couldn't find any info on the operating system that ran with, so I wonder if it ran smooth - even Android only starting running smoothly with the release of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean in the middle of 2012 with its Project Butter.
>Samsung Galaxy S3
I remember ogling the Galaxy S2 a little around the time it came out, since I liked its design back then - I came across it by accident on a tech blog, never planned on getting it. But with the Galaxy S3, Samsung really shifted their focus on their new "round edge aesthetic", which also had its charm. I would kind of like to check both phones out someday, even if there's no real purpose to it.
What might blow your mind (if you don't know about it yet, of course): At the end of last year, someone published an unofficial port of LineageOS 19.0 (based on Android 12) for the Samsung Galaxy S3. It's still in Alpha, but the only real downside so far seems to be "random reboots", and if that gets sorted out...!
#smartphones #cfw #technology #nostalgia
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re: Old Mobile Phones
@okabe_rintarou
>Do you have any fond feelings towards it?
Not really. I really wanted a smartphone, but my parents couldn't afford a data plan at the time. I really didn't take advantage of the additional features either. It was mainly for calling my parents to be picked up after extra-circular activities.
Though now, that I think about it, I am getting pretty nostalgic for it's music player. It didn't do much but it's bass filter gave me a greater appreciation for baselines in music.
>Were there any themes (the orange theme in the photos is a bit hard on my eyes)?
They only had the orange or green theme initially, but a firmware update later changed the orange theme to blue for whatever reason.
>Did you try to browse on the internet with it?
No because I didn't have a data plan and I think without one they charge something like 10 cents per megabyte. I did use the social network app but it was really just a front-end for Facebook's and Twitter's post via SMS feature.
>I couldn't find any info on the operating system that ran with
It's probably some custom firmware just like most other feature phones. I think it ran Java when it came to the downloadable apps (which I never used and were probably just games). It got the job done. Since, you're most likely not downloading a bunch of stuff on there, you wouldn't expect it to slow down.
I ended up breaking the micro-usb port on the thing so I wasn't able to charge it anymore. I was actually phoneless for a few months. It was really bad because I started driving around the same time, so I had no way of making an emergency call if were to get in an accident. It also sucked because I also used the thing as a flash drive. I used to write games in Windows batch files and I would store them on the phone because I had nowhere else to store them, but now they are lost to time.
re: Old Mobile Phones
>It also sucked because I also used the thing as a flash drive. I used to write games in Windows batch files and I would store them on the phone because I had nowhere else to store them, but now they are lost to time.
What a shame... Are you sure it's completely busted and can't be fixed? Would be nice to get it working and get your projects back.