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.
It was such a simple yet fun device. It had really good sound and an equaliser, which was special at the time. Played loads of music on it. Great battery life too. No WiFi, but honestly, that might be a plus nowadays.
The Sony Walkman / Ericcson slide was S tier.
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.
Oh boy how I miss using this bad boy:
HTC m8 and m9. Those were such good phones…
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
I’m still holding onto my V40, eventually want to use it as a soundboard for gaming or something
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.
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.
The snap of a clamshell
The sony walkman one.
Or the slide phones 🥲
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.
All the time. I’m an Apple guy, but I also have an Android phone. It’s a Galaxy S10 and despite being 7 years old, I still like it. I kinda want to replace it (the Fairphone 6+ is freakin’ awesome in green!) but it still gets the job done. I do miss my old Galaxy S3 sometimes, the custom firmware I ran on it. My favourite was called LiquidSmooth and it was based on Android 2.1 or 2.2 (Jellybean). It was a different world back then. I never woulda considered an iPhone back then. Now all phones are kinda samey. I use an iPhone because it’s boring (it’s consistent). I miss when being an Android user meant you were on an adventure. Now they’re just iPhones with spyware. (They were before too, but you could do more about it. And yes, I know GrapheneOS exists and so does LineageOS — I remember when LineageOS was called CyanogenMod.)
Jellybean was Android 4.3. I think Android phones weren’t really usable before that. But I didn’t get one til much later. The Galaxy S3 originally came with 4.0 and later with 4.3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_III
No idea about your custom firmware ofc.
I have an old Android 2.1 music player (Archos 43) still kicking around. It’s slow and the Android software is not very good.
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
Nokia N9, it was my first smartphone, it ran Linux, as in you could run sudo apt install in it and yes, sudo worked and you could get root access from factory. It was very sturdy, keyboard did some vibrations when you pressed so you got some tactile feedback which was invaluable in convincing me to use a phone with no buttons, it had gesture navigation which took years to arrive in other phones, plus some games I never got to finish and now I can’t play anymore.
I still have my N9 left in a drawer, and it still works if I want to open it for a bit of nostalgia. It’s really small compared to today’s phones.
I also have my Jolla there too, but that one has a cracked screen.
