Every phone I ever owned
A childhood friend and I somehow got on the topic of mobile phones. We started trying to recall when we got our first ones, which models the other person had, filling gaps in each other’s memory. Between us we pieced together the full timeline.
Nineteen phones in twenty years. Polyphonic ringtones to Face ID.
Before smartphones
The Nokia tune. T9 texting. Snake. Tanks. Beaming files over infrared. GPRS let you load a webpage if you were patient, and when EDGE came along it felt like a leap. 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 stock Android. 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.
