I got into a nostalgic mood again and decided to share it with you. Sit back in our time machine and let's go.
And today we will talk about five phones, which were the first for me in some way. It would be pointless to share some technical characteristics and other things that we are talking about in relation to modern devices. Here will be only the most vivid impressions of those that remain in memory. For some devices there will be more of them, for some less. But I think many of these models will overlap with those devices (or memories) that you had at that time. So, despite the rather selfish headline, it should be interesting. Let's get started!
Siemens M50 – the very first phone
I got my first phone in the summer of 2003. I didn’t understand technology at all then, I didn’t have a computer or the Internet, I didn’t understand anything about what models exist and what they can do. I knew only one thing – a cell phone can call and have it very cool.
Only a couple of models – Siemens M50 and LG W3000 – fit into the budget that I had in my hands.
I preferred the German company because it seemed more reliable, and no one in the store showed me how the device sounded from LG. The point was that LG W3000 became the first mid-range phone with a polyphonic speaker. After the fact, I learned what polyphony is and that this advantage was in the device I refused to buy. However, Siemens M50, despite the classic speaker, had other pleasant and modern features at that time.
First of all, I would like to note the bright blue backlight, which seemed somehow magical after the dull dirty green displays of Nokia. I looked at the display, and I wanted to smile, everything was so beautiful.
Even though the M50 had a monochrome display, it didn't stop it from supporting Java games. I could get stuck in the built-in StackAttack2 and WaveGame for hours. They seemed to me much cooler and more interesting than “Snakes” and Space Impact from Nokia at that time.
In addition, Siemens M50 supported the GPRS technology, only I could not evaluate it. It is corny that the operators in my city did not have support for packet data transfer at that time.
But the support for predicative input – the legendary T9 – was very useful to me. With the help of it, you could have fun hanging out in any of the operator's SMS services: play text games, meet advanced girls in text dating services, and also participate in all kinds of contests. Once I even guessed the author of a goal in one of the matches of the Russian football championship, for which I received a branded merch from MTS – a Jeans T-shirt, a huge ballpoint pen, and something else. In the absence of a mobile Internet, all this seemed like a real future, only money from the balance (which was still in dollars) flew away instantly.
That phone was stolen, and the police (and she) never found the ends.
While looking for photos of the phone for you, I suddenly found a review of Siemens M50, authored by Eldar:
- Review of GSM phone Siemens M50
Motorola C350 – the first phone with a color display
In 2003, the first relatively inexpensive device with a color display, the legendary Motorola C350, began to be sold in Russia. After the theft of the M50, I couldn't look at anything else but him. Remember the Paul Van Dyck commercial and the legendary phrase “Hellomoto”?
Until I turned on the C350 and saw it with my own eyes, I could not believe that a mobile phone screen can display as many as 4096 different colors! True, on such a screen nothing was visible at all in the sun, but it doesn't matter, you could always cover it with your palm.
It was on the C350 that I first saw what a mobile WAP-Internet looks like. You could go to wap.mobilmusic.ru, download the main theme from the movie “Boomer” and enjoy all 24 voices (in fact, no) polyphonic dynamics, while all the other numerous owners of C350 sounded the standard “Latin dance”.
By the way, then I first encountered download restrictions from operators. I didn’t want to download ringtones at the “Jeans” tariff from MTS, but there were no such problems with the “Beeline” SIM card. The payment was per minute as it used a CSD connection. The cost of such a wap-Internet, if memory serves, was about 10 cents per minute, which is about 3 rubles in Russian. Expensive, very expensive.
This Motorola served faithfully for a year and a half, but I somehow forgot what happened to her later.
- Review of GSM phone Motorola C350
Siemens CF62 – the first clamshell
Clamshells have never been Siemens' strong point, but back in 2004 I got a device from this company in this form-factor. It was just that then I really wanted a clamshell and Siemens, and such a model just recently appeared on sale. But I remember this device not by the form factor, but by the first “geeky” experiments.
The fact is that at that time there was already a fairly developed community, which was called Siemens-Club. By those standards, it was a large, but very cozy forum, where various firmware and patches were posted. It didn’t come to “elves” then, they appeared a little later on the devices of the 65th series. But tinkering with patches was also interesting. The most useful of them allowed expanding the built-in memory from the standard 1.56 MB to 2.88 MB, which did not affect the stability of the work at all. But the increase in memory up to 4 MB already led to the fact that the smartphone could be turned off arbitrarily. With the help of patches, it was also possible to change the theme and add some simple functions, but which ones I don't remember anymore.
After some time, I bought a 0.3MP plug-in camera for the CF62. She had an optical viewfinder and a bright flash like a camera. By the way, it was impossible to use the screen as a viewfinder: first a picture was taken with this external module, and then after a few seconds it was displayed on the screen. The quality of photographs for that time was very good, much better than the cameras built into the phones, and the memory expanded to 2.88 MB was used to store them.
Siemens CF62, by the way, did not yet support mp3 (the competitor was famous for this – Motorola C650), and fragments from songs had to be converted to WAV. A single ringtone could weigh as much as 300 KB, which was an incredible waste of free space, but it was worth it – in terms of quality with WAV, no MMF could compare with the voice for 40-voice polyphonic Samsung.
While writing the last few paragraphs, I was surprised to find that Siemens-Club in its wap version is still available on the Internet. I read some of my posts, I shed a tear …
At the end of using the CF62, I accidentally broke the internal display, and after a couple of weeks it was replaced by my first smartphone.
- Review of GSM-handset Siemens CF62
Nokia 6630 – the first smartphone
I looked after the first smartphone in 2005 for a long time and carefully. About half a year passed in the throes of choice and discussion on the forums. As I remember now, the main contenders were Siemens SX1, Motorola MPx220 and, in fact, Nokia 6630. I liked the first one very much outwardly, but at that time it came with the outdated Symbian 6.1 system. The second required a computer to install programs, which I didn't really like. And the third one was perfect for me, and it also worked on the updated Symbian 8.0 platform. Moreover, due to the release of Nokia 6680/6681, its price dropped to quite acceptable 12 thousand rubles.
Together with the Nokia 6630, ICQ came into my life – the first truly mass messenger. To be online, you had to go to the application and connect to the Internet. Smartphones did not yet live online all the time, but applications with a sufficient amount of RAM did not themselves unload from it. In 6630, everything was fine with this, besides, it could work through an “internet” access point, which was ten times cheaper than a wap connection.
Another vivid impression was the games from the Nokia N-Gage mobile console, most of which worked well on the 6630. However, to control some of them I had to train a non-standard grip and dexterous fingers – the arrangement of the buttons was radically different from that of a gaming device.
And also Nokia 6630 became one of the first devices that supported 3G, but this was irrelevant, there were no such networks in 2005-2006. I remember that an additional accessory with a front camera was even sold for him, so that you can make video calls. As for selfies, there were still 5-7 years before the appearance of such a concept.
By the way, this is the only device from the past that I still have and which still works well.
- Review of GSM-handset Nokia 6630
iPhone 3G – first iPhone
In 2010, a few months before the announcement of iPhone 4, I realized that it was time to buy iPhone. I already had experience with iOS (iPhone OS), since at that time I had been using the advanced 3rd generation iPod touch for several months, and I really wanted to get everything the same, but only with the phone function.
To buy iPhone I had to sell three of my gadgets. At that time, it was my main device, Nokia E63, the iPod touch and PSP Slim mentioned above. Why do I need all this, I thought, if iPhone combines the functions of all three devices. The money I earned was enough for me only for iPhone 3G, but in a trendy white color and top-end configuration with 16 GB of internal memory!
The device was greatly reduced in functionality: it did not have full-fledged multitasking, it was impossible to set wallpaper on the desktop, transfer files even from iPhone to iPhone. It's good that the clipboard was added at the time of my purchase (it appeared in iPhone OS 3, and iPhone 3G came out of the box with iPhone OS 2). Moreover, my friends didn’t appreciate my enthusiasm from the purchase iPhone: “Nokia know, Samsung know, LG we know, Motorola we remember, but about iPhone this is the first time we hear it ”. In the spring of 2010, few people heard about iPhone 500 km from Moscow …
True, I enjoyed the excellent speed of the smartphone (in fact, this was the only thing that distinguished iPhone from other devices) for a very short time. After a couple of months Apple presented iPhone 4, and with it iOS 4. Having updated to this version, iPhone 3G not only began to slow down wildly, but also did not receive the key features of the new version – multitasking and those same desktop wallpapers. By the way, they could be activated using Cydia, but the device barely tossed and turned. In the end, I got tired of the fact that even standard dialer and SMS applications take 10 seconds to open, and I sold iPhone.
Conclusion
These were my 2000s and 5 of the most interesting devices in those days. Now, over the years, it seems to me that then the devices developed much more rapidly, every year something radically new appeared, which was not there before. Does it seem so to you? What devices are vividly remembered and, most importantly, for what? What impressions do you still remember about your old phones?