Ask Lemmy

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.)

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.

Motorola Droid 2. I just miss keyboard sliders.

Occasionally I miss my old Nexus 5. The screen felt so big at the time and I loved it's sharp edges

Yes, all my various BlackBerrys.

1961 Bell System Model 554 Rotary Dial Wall Telephone

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.

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.

Sony Xperia Z3 Compact

Palm Centro

Palm Pre

Motorola Droid

Motorola RAZR V3M

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.

HTC m8 and m9. Those were such good phones...

HTC Windows Phone 8S. The Windows Phone was actually really nice and it's kinda sad it was discontinued.

My Nokia 6800

I miss the promise of WebOS and the palm Pre series. The 2 and 3 were in the right direction, and then HP 🔥

OG Moto Droid with the sliding keyboard.

Brilliant design, would love that again.

6210

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 Sidekick II. Bought it for $350 and sold it a year later for $300. Was a fun phone for a year and well worth the $50.

HTC Desire, my first Android and smartphone ever. I made a lot of Java applications on that thing. Maybe I should learn Kotlin to do the same on my current phone.

I hella want a modern Sidekick. Mostly for the physical keyboard.

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.

Nexus 5 is still my favorite phone I’ve owned. Affordable, no-nonsense, and lightweight.

My Nexus 6P with the finger print sensor on the back. It supported gestures on the fingerprint sensor too, so you could unlock it and then swipe up or down to do an action. I had down swipe as pull down the notification shade, so could check notifications without even touching the screen.

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.

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.

https://www.androidauthority.com/moto-mods-789689/

So many lol

The T-Mobile G1 was incredible. I wish they would remake it for today. A slide out keyboard, and a little mouse ball. It was fucking fantastic.

Blackberry 7230, I think. I looked up the timeline, and that looks like the right one, but the article says it was color. Mine was black and white. My mom got it for me because I loved to read, and could use it to read books outside.

Blackberry 7100t was peak. First time I watched Internet porn was on that phone lol

And at one point between the blackberry and my first android, my mom got me this phone with a built in MP3 player. It was so friggin thick, but it could hold so much music, and had an awesome camera. Around the same time, my buddy had a phone with a camera with a telescopic lense that looked more like a traditional camera than a phone.

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.

The Sidekick 4G. I miss physical keyboards on mobile devices.

I still have it, but reminisce is all that I can do because I have no landline service to plug it in. It's the Trimline phone that we had when I was growing up. I think it was the one my parents previously rented from Wisconsin Bell, then bought after the breakup of AT&T when they had to let customer-owned devices connect to the network. It sits in the superannuated telephone nook in my kitchen, because, why not?

Palm Pre. Aside from the OS itself, I miss the little paratrooper game that was seemingly, unfortunately, exclusive to WebOS.

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.

Nokia 3650 was my first smartphone and it was weird and quirky and awesome.

Nokia 6133, Flip phone that had a button which popped it open. Nothing else has felt as cool as pushing that button to answer a call.

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.

One company I worked at gave us all BlackBerrys (at least those of us who needed phones). BlackBerry was a little outdated at that point but then they released the BlackBerry 10 OS. It was actually decent, but the build quality on the Q10 I had didn’t match their earlier phones. It came too late to save Research in Motion, but I always felt if they’d developed it 5 or maybe even fewer years earlier then they might’ve survived at least as corporate phones. They were so far gone at that point, though, that BlackBerry put out a press release celebrating our company committing to buy a couple thousand phones.