They don’t make them small like they used to…
My old Motorola Razr. I used to like flipping it open like a Star Trek communicator, but it was also just a cool little phone.
When I was a little 1980s kid, my family got rid of a malfunctioning wall-mounted rotary phone which had been installed there since time immemorial. I asked if I could keep it and my mom said no, but she did let me exercise my curiosity by taking it apart to see what the innards were like.
I kept the dial, and it still lives on a shelf of mildly-interesting things in my house. It still spins, though the recoil speed is way slower than it should be
(I also grew up to be a phone phreak.)
I didn’t take apart a phone to get it, but I managed to buy a rotary dial mechanism from a surplus store near where I grew up when I was a teen (maybe thirty years ago?). I think I’ve still got it in a drawer. It’s honestly a very clever design, and the sound is kind of weirdly soothing.
1961 Bell System Model 554 Rotary Dial Wall Telephone
But the apps sucked.
This one didn’t suck, you blew
My purse got stolen once and my Sony Ericsson T300 (and my favorite lipstick) were in it, and nothing will ever emotionally live up to that phone. I loved it and I probably love it more because it was taken from me before I got tired of it.
LG used to put really good DACs in their phones. So for somebody who uses his phone as an MP3 player that can also take calls, my LG V30 was perfect.
I loved my V50… until it got baaaad screen burn-in. Older OLED screens were kinda crappy tbh
Nokia n900 for me, circa 2010. It ran Linux (real Linux!), had a pretty good camera, headphone jack, sd card slot, slide out keyboard, 4or 5 day battery life, xmpp instant messaging natively. It was perfect. It was a little bit chunky, but would fit in a jeans pocket perfectly and didn’t weigh too much.
HTC m8 and m9. Those were such good phones…
Perfect size and shape, good button response, no distracting apps, could provide mobile-internet over IR to a laptop (eg Satellite Pro 4200)(speed was in between 33.6kbps and 56 kbps) .
WAP was a nonsense gimmick.
Solid phone.
Nope. The only old phone I’m still impressed by was the old Motorola Razor flip phone. I had a blue one and my wife had a pink one. The number of times that phone rode through the washer and dryer without ever hesitating was amazing.
My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy S10. It’s the first smart phone I’ve had that hasn’t started glitching after the first two years. I ordered it on July 29, 2020, and it’s still going strong with no signs of stopping. I’ve never been forced to do so much as factory reset it. Every previous phone I’ve spent the last year or so I had it trying to coax it into lasting just a little longer.
I’ve replaced the factory-installed screen protector and the otter case I bought for this phone once. When I had the phone out of the old case and stripped of the screen protector, it still looked brand new.
The og Razr was truly a masterpiece. Sitting on a table, it’s vibrations could wake the whole house.
I firmly believe you could use it to chock the wheel of your car to prevent it from rolling while you changed a flat, and the phone would still work like new when you were done.
I had an odd and rare one: the LG AX490. Most of the phone was unremarkable, other than being somewhat car-shaped when closed, but it had an innovative keyboard system. There was a normal phone keypad, maybe slightly shrunk, but at the corners of each number button was a tiny raised button for each letter of the alphabet. It made anything text-related in the phone a breeze while keeping the normal flip phone shape.
My Nokia 6800
I miss having my Motorola Z2 Play, with the Moto-Mods platform, as a daily phone.
External mods that magnetically attach to the back of the phone. Primarily an extra 3500mah battery, but there were others: 360 camera, a printer, 3" stereo speakers, and even a projector.
I actually still have this phone, but it has become extremely slow, doesn’t get security updates, and is incompatible with lots of apps. It now lives on the handle bars of my ebike, with it’s extra battery mod; mostly as a gps. Occasionally I’ll use it with the projector on the wall of my bedroom; watching movies or youtube.
Modular phones are such an awesome concept. I wish someone could make a modern spin of it. Maybe like those framework laptops, idk
God I miss having flagship phone that would fit into my hand.
Also I miss windows phones. Fuck Microsoft, but they tried something different and imo it worked if you went in with an open mind.
iPhone 4S was one of my favorite phones. It was around the golden age of jailbreaking in my opinion. So much fun.
If we are going back before smartphones, then the RAZR V3i was a fun phone. SEEM editing was pretty sweet. Like, why was rhythm lights even a thing?
The Nokia 6820 will always have a special place in my heart as well. It was such a perfect little texting machine.
Blackberry phones worked everywhere, anywhere in the world, it was the only system that worked during 9/11.
physical keyboards were faster and more accurate.
