[Curiosities] Ten curiosities about phones that will make you feel old

[S e u o n g]

Smartphones are one of the most complete devices that we can enjoy today. Thanks to powerful low-power processors and modern operating systems, we can enjoy an experience that until years ago was only possible to dream.

And it is that today in the palm of our hand we have access to a computer with internet anywhere on the planet that can also be a device to listen to music and watch movies, a camera, a game console and even a GPS .

Of course, when a product is good it is easy to get used to and difficult to remember that in the past, a telephone was only used to make and receive calls. For young guys, sometimes it seems incredible that the phones of the time were so limited, and that is why today we bring you a compilation in which we highlight some of the key points of old phones, with their virtues and defects.

 

The batteries lasted eons
Battery is one of the biggest evils facing the modern smartphone today. Having such a powerful device and with so many possibilities, we end up using it to its exhaustion, becoming the norm to fully charge it once a day (there are some lucky ones who charge it every two or three days).

 

The phones were indestructible
Another of the evils of today's phones is their fragility. Being devices in which everything is a screen, it is easy for a bad fall to end up breaking the front glass. As it is also important that the glass is as thin as possible to have a terminal that offers the best experience, it is a device with which we should be especially careful.

With old phones this problem did not happen. Since there were no special functions, manufacturers' top priority was to make devices that were very resistant, so the trend of changing phones per year was a practice that very few users did.

 

Each phone had its own personality
We already said it in our article about the mobiles that Nokia had to make on its return. We liked that each manufacturer had a thousand different phone models, each available to one type of customer. There were large, ultra-compact, console-shaped, aimed at the more adventurous, shell type, with a touch screen (yes, resistive), with a physical keyboard on the front or sliding.

 

Each phone had its own touch of the house dedicated to a type of customer, something that completely breaks with the current fashion of creating increasingly large touchscreens that occupy the front next to a metal back, designs so clone that many Sometimes it is difficult for us to differentiate one brand over another.

 

If you wanted Internet, to the computer
WhatsApp? Internet? On a phone? A dream within the reach of a few. Telephones in the past were not devices that could connect to the Internet as we do today, much less use chat applications to communicate, so it was necessary to pay for each SMS we sent, this being the biggest concern of parents with children addicted to mobile phones.

Over time, the WAP service appeared, a service that we could connect to the Internet through the telephone, but it was very slow and expensive, and the web was not yet ready for mobile connections. 3G and WiFi were a dream that would take a while to reach the masses.

 

The Angry Birds of the time was the Serpent
If we were to target one game today as the absolute benchmark for smartphone entertainment, it would be Angry Birds (closely followed by Candy Crush). Being the go-to game means that when a kid is looking for his first phone, he's interested in getting the hot game to work on his new phone (and yes, on my first Android tablet, Angry Birds didn't work).

At the time, there were not many games, but there was one that every kid with a new phone wanted to have. It is about the snake, a very typical game of the first telephones that served as a distraction for those dead moments when we were away from home and we had forgotten our Game Boy.

 

Nobody wanted touchscreens
Touchscreens are not a modern invention, they really have been around since the 70s. The perfect way to interact with our phone today used to not be through a touch screen, and it was certainly not the preferred method.

Generally, most telephones had a kind of "wheel" with four directions or a crosshead with which to move through the menus. This was because resistive touch screens in most cases were quite rough, requiring a pointer, so they were relegated to PDAs, also called digital agendas.

 

Windows was the giant to beat
A few years ago, the phones with the most functionalities were called PDA’s. These digital diaries already included the first mobile processors and were used mainly by professionals.

 

At this time, the only mobile devices that Apple manufactured were iPods, which were used exclusively for listening to music, while on the other hand, Google was a company that was in full growth, the competition was on a completely different front from the one. we meet today.

Nokia had Symbian, while Palm and Blackberry had their own operating systems. At the top of the mountain was not our Android, but Windows Mobile, the version for PDAs from the manufacturer Microsoft.

Neither Apple nor Samsung, the battle was Nokia against Motorola
Times change, but the fanboys remain. Throughout history, we have always found in each market a leading brand compared to one that, despite being behind, sometimes ends up standing up. Coca Cola against Pepsi, Cola Cao against Nesquick, Nvidia against AMD or even with the potato omelette, where there are groups that prefer it with onion or without onion.

 

If we go to the world of smartphones, the main fanboys battle is usually Apple against Samsung, but it was not always like that. In the previous section we saw how Apple at the time was completely focused on music and computers, while Samsung did sell mobile phones, but it was considered a second-tier manufacturer. The real battle at the time was Nokia versus Motorola, and as you can suspect, there were already discussions about which brand was better. Of course, Nokia ended up being the biggest of all the manufacturers, but my favorite phone of the time is the Motorola V3.

You had to pay for any bullshit
Today we download any application, music or video from the Internet, as if it were a computer, but the truth is that at the time it was not so easy to access so many resources for free.

 

At the time, it was common to find ourselves on television (did anyone dislike the song above?) With advertisements that promised us all kinds of ringtones, images or even some games, but the cost to pay was not that simple. If you wanted one of those coveted products, you had to send an SMS with a code to a specific number. Unfortunately, these SMS did not have the price of a traditional text message, but were much more expensive than some games that we can find on Google Play.

A mobile could not replace cameras
At the time, if they had told us that our mobile phone was going to replace compact cameras, we would not have believed it, and that is that although the arrival of cameras on mobile phones seemed an impressive milestone, the poor quality of the same only served for specific moments, being necessary traditional cameras.