Every phone I ever owned
A childhood friend of mine and I took a trip down the memory lane about which mobile phones we used to own. Between us we pieced together an approximate timeline.
Nineteen phones in twenty years. Polyphonic ringtones to Face ID.
Before smartphones
The Nokia tune. T9 texting. Snake. Beaming files over infrared. GPRS GPRS to EDGE. Batteries lasted a week because there wasn’t much to drain them. Phones were built like bricks and survived being treated like ones too.
The Sony Ericssons were a step up with actual cameras and better media. The 6600 ran Symbian, which was the closest thing to a smartphone OS back then. You could install apps, sort of. The E63 was my first QWERTY keyboard after years on a numpad.
The Android wild west
Android opened everything up. Root your phone, flash custom ROMs, brick it, recover it, do it again. Four phones in two years. Every manufacturer had a different take and nothing was locked down.
Finding a lane
First taste of iOS fluidity with the iPhone 5. Then a BlackBerry Bold because I missed physical keyboards. Then a Nexus 5 for that stock Android experience. I was bouncing between ecosystems trying to figure out what mattered more, the freedom to tinker or things just working.
Locked into Apple
Turns out I wanted things to “just work”. AirDrop, iMessage, handoff between devices. Apple kept adding small conveniences that made switching feel like more hassle than it was worth. Five iPhones in and I’m fully locked in. Can’t be bothered to leave.
