What was the last dumb phone you had before your first smartphone?

droidpenguin@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 421 points –

I rocked a Samsung Alias 2 for 4 years before I got an iPhone 5. The e-ink keyboard was awesome how it changed when you flipped the screen open to portrait or landscape.

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Bring back sliders with full keyboards

Being back T9. I could text with it in my pocket.

What duh the ib huwdb I j texted from my pitcher just fine.

If you didn't text with a rotary phone you were a fucking noob: There, I said it.

T9 would work on a rotary phone input. You would save a lot of of time. It would still take a lot of time.

I really want one, I hate virtual keyboards so much. There's the f(x)tec phones but their keyboards come out in landscape mode and I'd really rather have one where it's portrait like the Palm Pre

I got one of them tiny foldable bluetooth keyboards for anything longer than replies. Brings it with me everywhere, it's super handy.

Yet not as handy as a slide out keyboard.

I never saw one where the keys were big enough that I didn't mash everything around the target key with the size of my fingers, and I really don't have big hands or anything.

The size of the keys are not really the issue, the size of the spacing around them is.

The BlackBerry Curve has my favorite keyboard, and I DO have big hands!

I had an HTC Tilt back when the first iPhone was released. Aside from that phone running windows mobile (holy Christ, what a mess that was), I loved it so much. But then I finally joined the cult at the 3GS.

Motorola DROID 4 was my dream phone. Alas, it was never released down here, so I could never buy one, even used.

my first smart phone was a Motorola Droid that had a physical keyboard. Cameras have come a long way.

motorola razr

I paid $400 for one of these brand new and it was ludicrous at the time. I thought it was super cool though.

So did I, and it was. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.

As a huge Formula 1 and Ferrari fan I had a Razr Maxx V6 Ferrari edition.

Best phone ever. I read through whole libraries on that little thing, and it looks so futuristic (as long as you don't look at the 500 pixel screen or the 140p camera)

I still have my champagne Razr around here somewhere. It works, even looks pretty new.

Nokia 3310

This was mine, which I used from 2001 until 2011. I loved that phone

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I adored that phone!! I still miss the interchangeable covers instead of adding a stupid case to the phone. I had a few cases I could swap depending on my outfit or the occasion. I wish new phones would adopt a similar idea instead of having to add an extra cover on top of the phone. I don’t need it to look good under the cover. Just make the outside looks nice.

I always thought this was such a cute phone

A Nokia 3100 ... it was the first phone I bought, and I kept it through college and beyond.

The thing was a beast :-)

128x128 pixel screen, with 12-bit RGB. No WiFi, no Bluetooth. Had some web access with WAP (no not that! "Wireless Access Protocol"). It did have a camera module though /rofl

And best of all, the battery lasted a week!

I wish phones would go back to being unique. I want a slider with a physical keyboard (like the HTC EVO Shift). My Pixel 6 Pros battery is showing wear already but there's nothing on the market I feel is worth switching to.

Just wish modern devices still had easily removable back covers without needing pry tools and hair dryers.

I loved the early galaxies and the zero lemon batteries. They were ridiculously cheap, so you could have like 3 charged at any time. Then if you ever got robbed you could just say "e-waste!" And toss a dead battery at your assailants eyes.

LG enV... Clamshell phone with a full keyboard when opened... God, that phone was awesome

enV 2 for me, used that thing until my senior year in 2013

I had this sick LG car phone and it made vroom vroom sounds. Used it for a decade and I still have it and it still works.

Does BlackBerry count as a dumb phone? I have a hard time calling it a smart phone.

I had the Envy 2, the last phone I had with an actual physical keyboard.

It's the one feature I miss the most. If I could have smartphone functionality with a physical keyboard I would be much happier.

I think about this all the time. I'll give up being waterproof for a full-sized slide-out keyboard.

This isn't my hand but I had this lovely bastard:

I used to be able to chuck it down the stairs and everything.

Haha! This! I still have mine in my treasure box of 1990s-2010s tech, with my iPod and my green Gameboy pocket.

My "iPod Classic", for all its faults, had survived going under a bus's wheel unscathed and falling off my bike at speed a few times before I finally consigned it to the box of electronic stuff I wasn't going to take with me when I emigrated three years ago. The Gameboy colour's in the cupboard as I type! I might even bring it with me when society collapses and I have to forage.

A Samsung slider. I remember watching the Matrix the first time, and when that phone popped open to reveal the keypad it was mind-blowing. Getting a slider phone a few years later was so satisfying.

The phone in the movie was a Nokia. I believe it was the 7910, if memory serves me correctly.

The spring loaded slide wasn't really a thing. I think one version of the phone had it in the production release, but it was limited to a very small geographical area... I think somewhere in Asia? I forget.

Everywhere else had the phone to some extent, minus the spring loaded sliding action. You just had up push the cover down.

Source: my best friend had one. After... I think, 3? Years of owning it, he was so fed up with its dumb quirks that I think he snapped the slider thing off... Which had the mic in it, so he got a new phone right after that.

EDIT: I was mistaken, it was the Nokia 7110.

SonyEricsson w810i. It was a great phone and an upgrade from my earlier SonyEricsson T610. The w810i is in my bedroom drawer.

I got the first Android smart phone after those (G1/Dream) which I still have in my kitchen drawer.

Happy memories texting my mates in uni. God so much has changed in 20yrs. 😱

Mine was Sony Ericsson V630.

It endured me untill 2012 when I exchanged it for Sony Xperia T, it's second best phone I had.

A other happy v630i user here. Don't know how many years I spent all in all, but I used it for everything. Even remember loading some books as text files, and reading quite a lot on its tiny screen during the longer bus rides.

The w810i was my first ever mobile phone and also my last dumb phone. I used it for 9 years.

I used it for 9 years.

Exactly - phones used to last! I also dropped my w810i a few times but it never broke. Great little phone. In fact I'm gonna charge mine to have a play on it. I think it had an MP3 player too!

It was still working back then, I changed because i was getting tired of typing on the small keys. I could type without looking, this was pretty cool ! All of the key had worn off anyway 😂

I think it was my Motorola Razr, then I got a Black Berry Bold, or some such. So yeah, the Razr.

I can't for the life of me remember what it was called, or who made it. It was a phone with a full keyboard, and instead of sliding the keyboard out it opened like a little laptop. When it was closed, it was a shiny silver blank rectangle with a display that would shine through when a call was made or when someone called me.

There were so many cool unique phones before Basic Rectangle With Button took over.

I'm surprised I haven't seen Sidekick II here. I think that was one of my last ones via T-Mobile before the first LG Android phone came out.

Just had look at it, a Sony IT-B3 wall-hung. Never needed charging. So dumb it could only memorize phone numbers. Used it once or twice a week.

Finally got a free Android when digital got under $20/mo.

The Samsung SCH-U740

It was a good one! It literally flipped 2 ways.

I absolutely loved mine until it got stolen out of my locker during track practice

Depends on "how dumb?" I had a Motorola RZR before my first iPhone(2), then before that, some camera flip phone (Motorola E815), and before that, an SCH-3500 flip phone. Before that, land lines only.

Don't remember exactly what it was, but I think it was Samsung and was one of the ones where you slid it up to access the keypad. I got it around middle school as a hand-me-down from my dad. I thought it was the absolute coolest thing at the time, despite that was around when my parents were upgrading to smart phones. I'll definitely have to look it up to see what it was.

Edit:

On GSMArena there is 66 pages of different model Samsung phones and plenty that you slid up to access the keypad. Finding the exact model would be like finding a straw of hay in a needle stack, so I'm giving up after 14 pages.

Yeah took me forever to find mine, about 20 pages. Worth it for the nostalgia hit though. GSM arrange by age though so if you can guess when you got it that might narrow it down for you.

The last phone I had before I got an Android phone was an LG EnV2. I still have the thing, it still turns on though no networks support it and the battery is toast. Sometimes I just hold it in my hand for a few minutes because it's just such a nicer thing to interact with than my S10e.

I don't really count it as a "dumb phone" though. I had some Samsung slider before that that really was a "Camera phone." Effectively no web browser, no app ecosystem at all, you could barely get the pictures it took out of it. The EnV2 was USB, there were games and things you could get for it, it had some email and web capability.

Then I got my LG Ally phone running some android version from before they started naming them after sweets, and it's all been downhill from there.

you could barely get the pictures it took out of it.

Ugh. I had some kind of old Samsung flip phone in the late 2000's and I had a picture on it of my ATV hanging upside down in the top of a tree. Easily 20m high. But I had trouble getting the pic off the phone, and now the phone is long gone.

Like they seriously thought "this camera is 100% for MMS messages, no one will want to keep the photos they take."

It is interesting that a phone with querty keyboard, web browsing and camera is called a dumb phone.

“Camera”, “Web Browsing”…. In name only.

I had the phone pictured in the post. I even activated the browser. It was 100% trash. WAP sites and browsers were nothing like even the first iPhone. That’s what made the iPhone such a shock, no one had browsed the web like that on a phone before and it was, no exaggeration, a game changer.

As for the camera the first iPhone camera was garbage comparatively but still was better than most if not all flip phones. I have picture back from when I had that phone pictured in the post and they are a grainy mess.

Well yeah, things improved. I guess the real difference is that the smart phone is actually a mobile general purpose computing device, which, by the way, also makes a call. My reason for buying iPhone 1 was to combine two devices in one - iPod and mobile phone. I did not expect that e-mail, web browsing and camera were so good. But the real game changer was an App Store, which came later.

LG enV Touch. The thing was actually awesome. Music player was dope, touchscreen worked well, full physical keyboard, and the browser could load Flash. The web browser wasn't perfect but was on par with the blackberry of the time.

Some flip-phone from Sprint, though I can't even recall the name now. It had the ability to play text-based games and even snake! I think I was carrying a Palm Pilot near the end of that. It was an upgrade from the first brick I kept in my car for emergencies only. In 2004ish, I upgraded to a Siemens SX66 (Windows-based smartphone) and ditched the Palm Pilot. I continued to use Windows phones (I think I ended with an HTC Hero or something similar), until finally being convinced by borrowing a friend's old iPhone to get one of those. Was on iPhone from 3gs until 6plus. I made the jump to Android when Pixel 6 Pro came out, and that's what I still have today.

Another early 2000's smartphone user. Whoop whoop. It seems to blow people's mind that you could have a colour touchscreen smartphone years before the stupid iPhone was even invented.

An LG EnV 3. The full keyboard was a must for new!

I had an LG EnV 2!! It was great. Its a very good class of phone.

my only "dumb phone" was a nokia 5300.

i used it for years, until i got dads old iphone 3 after he switched to a samsung phone.

i think that was a few months before jobs died, and the iphone 4s was released.

I had an LG VX4500. Loved that phone and still have it sitting somewhere in a drawer today.

I'll charge up old phones from time to time to read old text messages.

Nokia N93
My first smartphone was HTC HD2 which I replaced around 2016 for Pixel, which I still use.

Does that qualify as a dumb phone though? Symbian could do a lot more, and better, in the area of productivity tools, multitasking, customization and apps management than android/iOS did, and for a very long time. The form factor wasn't putting as much emphasis on the screen real estate but that doesn't make it less smart.

N93 definitely a smartphone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N93?wprov=sfla1

I'd say it was a "smart phone" and not a "smartphone". It, and other Symbian phones like it, existed before the iPhone came out and made touchscreen smart phones a thing. Basically a PDA + Phone.

Even Samsung had a colour touchscreen before iPhone but no one saw it as the first "smartphone". The iPhone was the 'first' true smartphone though you could argue several others before it were smartphones. But I'd class them as "smart phones".

That may be your opinion, but if you follow my Wikipedia link, it says it's a smartphone, so I'm not even going to argue. Wikipedia has a widely accepted definition of a smartphone.

I had the n95 and I loved it as well. the N-series was fantastic.

but they are sadly smartphones.

N95 was my phone when my friend got the iPhone One. I remember uselessly arguing that my N95 also played videos and music and all that iPhone stuff as well.... Except, it was so fucking slow to take videos.

I remember standing in the street and seeing a massive huge brawl outside of a pub, loads of people doing all sorts of crazy shit and I was standing there desperately trying to record a video while the shitty, sluggish N95 missed it all.

That experience really scarred me because now I'm obsessed with the absolute quick-draw features of modern phones - like the Google Pixel.

I will say... I kinda miss the T9. but I might be alone in that. lol. I feel like they used some kind of beefed up T9 software for symbian. specifically to use in the Nseries phones. but I am not 100% certain.

I just remember that texting was never an issue and I could do it fast with the T9.

I would argue im still using a dumb phone because it sure aint smart

Motorola Pebl.

I had one and it was great. I rode a scooter everywhere at the time, and I could pull this out of my pocket, let it spring open and stick it up inside my helmet for some easy one hand to hands free calls.

Pretty sure this was my last feature phone as well. I liked it. I probably still have it floating around in a drawer somewhere.

Sony Ericsson W810i. Got it in 2007, I think. When it started to die on me in late 2009 i replaced it with an iPhone 3G, which was my first apple phone. It was also my last apple phone as I hated how locked down everything was.

EDIT: I just remembered I had a secondary dumbphone around 2012 or thereabouts. It was a dual SIM nokia of some sort that I used mainly as a backup phone in case my main ran out of battery while I was on the move.

BlackBerry Pearl

I wouldn't call that a dumb phone. It had a full web browser and the ability to side load apps.

Blackberry pearl is a smartphone, at least according to Wikipedia. I've never used it, but I'd say all blackberries were smartphones.

Dude I loved my Envy 2, played so much Tetris in the bathroom at work!

The nokia BRICK. No clue its really name but we all know the phone. It was my first phone i got when i entered high school.

Nokia n70. Still think about it sometimes, it was a great little phone.

I used Nokia N79. Nokia N series had some amazing phones.

Landline -> Nokia 6600 -> Sony Ericsson P990i -> Android 2.3 "Gingerbread"

Been on Android ever since

My first phone was a smartphone. But a smartphone version of the one in your picture would be awesome.

This small form factor running Android would be very cool! Despite a small screen, it'd probably work well enough since you wouldn't have a software keyboard taking up 50% of the screen real estate. The e-ink keyboard is a good compromise of having dynamic changing keys but still have the tactile feedback.

I don't member the exact model but I had an LG Voyager that i held onto for a long time... I did NOT want to give up my physical keyboard for the touchscreen keyboard so I held out as long as I could. If Samsung came out with a slide-out keyboard for smartphones I'd be on that shit right away.

Nokia N95 and I'd probably still be using it if I didn't decide it was a great idea to go swimming with my clothes on.

Nokia n95 is a smartphone, not a dumb phone. It has Symbian OS, you can install apps, copy/paste, browse internet. I used to have the 8gb one, it has more capabilities than the first iPhone.

Yep, it was a great phone and I had it as my last too. Not a smartphone in our current understanding, but still close to a dumb phone and with great functionality. Can't remember what happened to mine, but my dad got it reconditioned and used it for a while after me until he got a modern smartphone too

I had the James Bond edition of Sony Ericsson C902. The camera was nice but the UI had frame rate issues. I came from a brown SE K770i which was buttery smooth. From C902 I went to Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, my first touchscreen phone and first Android where I learned about apps, OS updates, fustom ROMs, etc. What a fantastic phone that was.

How dumb? OG Motoroloa RAZR V3 > Nokia N96 before I had an iOS or Android device.

Owned a whole bunch of Sony / Sony Ericsson phones for about a decade.

Last one before the Xperia for me was the Aino..... Loved that thing.

Is it weird you can still get them?

An LG C1300. I carried that thing for several years. Never had to replace the battery and it would still go 3 days on a charge when I finally switched to an iPhone 3

I held out on a smartphone for a long time because I loved my Alias so much. That keyboard thing was cool as fuck.

Fuck yeah, I had the Alias 2 too. Such a cool phone. Then I also switched to an iphone 5.

Do you still use an iPhone? I switched to Android after 4 years with my iPhone 5 and still use Android today.

Yeah I switched to Android after iphone removed the headphone jack. Sadly it was only a matter of time before Android followed suit. I had LGs for a while and now I have a pixel.

I also had the Alias 2. Great phone. Technically I still have it but it is inactivated.

I still have a flip phone. Nokia piece of shit on Verizon. Works well for voice but it's shit for anything else.

I don't even want a smartphone now. would love a feature flip phone with the capability of being a hotspot. so wish that was a thing.

Ditto. My only hangup comes from how hard it is to find a 5G feature phone that works with US carriers.

I also had the alias 2. I thought I was pretty hot shit with the fancy flip-both-directions phone. And I think there was a little display on the outside too, right? With the time and some other basic notifications?

I don't know, the last one was maybe a Motorola clamshell, but from the "old" ones I had a Bosch GSM909, yes, they made phones. Barely usable and horribly expensive to use. But it had a blue 2 line display. A BLUE DISPLAY. Woooooow.

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That blue is very nice!

That's what I thought back then... I believe. Everyone had a green or orange display, I was the young rebel I was back in the day ;)

My last phone before my first smartphone was a Microsoft Kin 2, but it was actually a pretty cool phone if you didn't want to pay for a data plan.

The last one I had was the original Motorola Razr and it was the second cell phone I ever had. My first phone was actually a smartish phone; my first cell was a Danger Hiptop (Sidekick). It was almost exactly like a modern smartphone; internet connected and used apps. But was around before the iPhone and did not have a touch screen. Only reason it wasn't also my last "dumb" phone was because my original broke long after they stopped selling them. Just to put in perspective how long I had these: my next phone after the Razr and first actual smartphone was a Nexus 4.

Sony-Ericsson W350i. Had it for about a year before I got my first Android device, an HTC Hero.

I remember my first phone better than the last feature phone I had. First was the Nokia 5190

The last non-smartphone I owned was a Samsung I think. One of the first ones that supported media playback. It was a flip/clamshell design. After that it was a string of questionable choices until I got my first Nexus.

I had a strtrk phone (I think that was the name), which was a clamshell Windows Mobile phone and I really liked it but I went for a walk on a pretty warm day and got a call. After a long conversation, enough sweat got into the phone that it died. I also had the HTC touch, I think it was called. Anyways, it was a soap bar but slid sideways and had a qwerty keyboard, also Windows phone. I eventually picked up a Motorola milestone (other regions may know it as the Motorola Droid), which was similar to the HTC, but thinner, with a bigger screen, and it ran android, my first Android phone.

Then I eventually gave up on the hardware keyboard because nobody made phones with them that were any good, went through a few other HTC's that were all Android and very forgettable, until I landed on the Nexus 4. I've been doing the Google thing since. I owned a Nexus 4, 5, 6, 7, and 5X, as well as the pixel 1, 4 and now 7. Over the years, I've had secondary phones, usually iPhones, but not always, sometimes for work, sometimes just to have something different with me. I think I've used the 6/6 SE and one of the cheap ones.... I forget which cheap one, but one of them.

I don't think I could say, honestly. My last (and first) dumb phone was a hand-me-down from my mother c2009, and I rarely used it. It spent most of its remaining life in a drawer with its battery removed, only coming out when I was going places where other forms of communication would be scarce. I think I made maybe a dozen calls (and one seriously garbled text message) before grudgingly getting a smart device in 2011.

And yes, my Boomer mother had gone through multiple cell phones before her Millennial son got his first.

Some Sony Ericsson Xperia with a slideout keyboard. Was shocked how much of a dumb brick it was compared to my iPod Touch I got at the same time.

I think it was a 2nd-hand Nokia N-Gage someone gave me. Weird phone.

i'll let you know...

when i get one. still using a flipper. i don't "need" the internet in my pocket, and i love going weeks between charges.

Nokia 3510i if I recall.

I think I also had a cheap Motorola flip phone too.

Something like this, idk if it was this exact phone though. Only used it for a few months before getting an LG smartphone.

Had a Samsung F250L. Neat little phone, decent camera for the time I've had it (2008-13). As much as I'd like some dumb phones again, the very least it'd had to have is fucking whatsapp, otherwise i'd be the "incommunicado". I suspect something running KaiOS would suffice

A Samsung F400,it was a slider that slid up to reveal the number pad and down to reveal a speaker. Was great for music, don't remember much more about it. Moved on to the Blackberry Bold after that as far as I remember.

My very first phone was my only non "smart" phone. And even then it was pretty powerful for what it was. It had a web browser, could play mp3s, etc. but I don't think it was explicitly a smart phone.

My next phone was a Pantech Duo which was labeled a smart phone, but probably wouldn't be considered one by modern standards. It did the same thing as the previous phone, but you could load apps onto it, came with word, excel mobile on it, could do email, etc.

After that phone I got an iPhone 3g shortly after the 3gs came out.

Nokia 5228, those times were great when friends sent me some music using the bluetooth

Nokia c5-00 and I stil prefer it.

My last non-Andorid phone was a Motorola Krzr. It was a little longer and much less wide than a Razr. If I couldn't have a smartphone I would go back to that design in a second. It worked very well.

I had a Motorola StarTac, but I also had a plug-in organizer that I could import my contacts and initiate calls with. On top of that I had a cable that that I could tether my iPaq to by dialing #777 . My next phone was a Palm Treo.

I had a Sanyo SCP 7400 (clamshell) for a number of years during the mid-2000s and it was solid as a rock. Loved that phone.

Some blackberry, but if that doesn’t count then it was I think the lg chocolate.

A Siemens S55. After that I moved to a Treo 270, and stayed with Palm until Nokia gave me an N900

That little camera module looks like it actually took decent pics based on the sample on the wiki. Esp considering it's from 2002.

It did, but note that the linked picture is the full resolution of the camera. Also, the phone had very limited storage space, and the display was in no way suitable for displaying the pictures taken, so you just hoped for the best until you managed to check them on your computer.

The S55 got lost eventually, but the camera module should still be around here somewhere.

Motorola Q - sold as a smart phone, was in fact dumb. Before that, moto razr

This is a bit of a story, and depending on how you define it, I have gone back and forth between dumb and smart phones before I finally Settled on iPhone with the 5S

My first phone was a Nokia 3330, great phone, worked well, a bit too well for my parents liking when I found the wireless access protocol feature, and bruned 100sek on useless, slow internet access back in 2001 or so...

Later, I think I managed the impossible and broke my phone, and got my dads old Nokia 8210, that was extremely tiny, and really cool.

Dropped that in the snow and lost it.

Got a Sony Ericsson K700i, cool design, pretty useless phone, I lost it at home for months, and switched to my grandmothers old Nokia 5110, I meassured it against a real brick in the walls of my school, it was two thirds the size of the brick, found my K700i, but the joystick never really worked, so...

I got a Sony Ericsson K800i! That was a beast, awesome camera, rugged as hell, and super reliable, it was the first phone I had that had a usable music player, I had a large memory stick card that I filled with music, and just jammed, I broke so many 3.5mm adapters...

Then I got what I would describe as a smartish feature phone, the Nokia 5800, I even ran Putty on it to connect with a friend's Linux server and get on IRC with screen irssi! The phone was a touch phone, but resistive touch, so I needed a stylus, the music player was annoying, but the sound from the speakers, wow, it had BASE, and actually sounded good! I could even access Youtube on it, was brilliant on WiFi!

But the 5800 started deteriorating, and I had just got my first job, with my first paycheck I splashed the cash hard, and bought, what was my first smart phone, it was beutiful, had a fold out keyboard with a Swedish keyboard, a capacitive touchscreen, HDMI out, and it was mine. I had bought myself the amazing Nokia E7, can you believe it? A real Nokia E7! It was as badass as you could get back then, I felt like a complete hacker when I ran Putty on it with the keyboard folded out, I had even set up touch gestures to navigate irssi by swiping!

That phone got pickpocketed.

I could not afford to replace my E7 at the time, so I bought a Nokia Asha 300, it was crap, but worked well enough.

Now, at that time, I had a spare sim from an old mobile broadband I used in a temp apartment, it had unlimited data...

So I got a second phone!

I found a used Nokia E72, new in box, my dad had used one, and I liked the look of it, so I bought it from a reputable used phone dealer, and used it as mobile entertainment device, I could access youtube, even on the super tiny screen I got enjoyment out of the 144p video, but what I most enjoyed was internet radio, specifically, SLAYradio, an internet radio station only playing C64 remixes, that often can legally be downloaded for free, and I got so much music that way!

A few years later, I had got rid of the 300, and was using my E72 as my main phone, three days after gettibg a new job snd getting the final paycheck rom my last job, my E72 screen broke, so I got on the iPhone train with the S5

Q: have you ever used an android?

Yes, during the time when I had the Asha 300, I also carried several Android tablets, I also tried to switch to Android after my second iPhone, an iPhone SE (the original model), as I saw that Nokia had made a beutiful and fairly affordable Android phone, the 6.1

I ran it for two months, untill I dropped it and completely obliterated the screen, then I saw that I would have to send the phone away, and just gave up and went back to my iPhone SE.

One feeling I have allways had when it comes to Android, is that it feels like Google constantly is looking over my shoulder watching what I do, I don't get that feeling on my iPhone, that doesn't mean that Apple isn't watching me constantly, but the feeling is different.

I had a blackberry bold which was sorta in between smart and dumb. My last actual dumb phone was an LG rumor, which was one of those with the full querty slide-out keyboard

Nokia 8210. It was small and awesome. It was before small became lame.

Motorola KRZR

God that phone sucked. It was so slow. I always wondered why Gameboy could be so damned fast, yet a phone with a much more powerful soc struggled just to bring up my contacts? They needed video game devs making the phone OS.

I'm to young for. feature phones. although my first phone was a wonderful 2010 HTC desire brown a high-end phone in its heyday with 576mb of ram and a 3.7 touchscreen and like with most older android smartphones this had an user replaceable battery headphone jack and are easy to root...... They don't make erm like they use to

Still rocking a burner flip phone after more than a decade.

I won't change until the network no longer supports them. Then I will likely go dark.

I believe it was Siemens MC60. I remember getting my arm broken and then getting 10k CZK from the accident benefits. Parents asked me what I wanted for part of that money when I was in the hospital and I said this.

Then I bought a refurbished Treo 650 in 2015, an awesome piece of technology if only it had a WiFi (there was a possibility of a module that clipped on the back which had its own battery, or there were WiFi SDIO cards, but I, being a poor student who poured all his savings into the phone (yeah, very bad financial decision), couldn't afford either of them.

I still miss a phone like that, but with a modern chipset and maybe a better OS (but still somehow based on the PalmOS original path)

Nokia N75. It was an upgrade from a Sony Ericsson hand-me-down after my invincible Nokia was thrown out of the window of my car as it was being stolen (I called it and the thief answered… long story).

The N75 had a 2mp camera and MP3 playing, but tiny storage and I got a free iPod (the touch wheel one) with a college powebook around the same time. I used the N75 online once, to locate a restaurant one time, and it probably cost my $3-5 since I had no data plan.

This was a right before the iPhone 3G would make those affordable and launch the App Store. I bought that for my wife and we never went back.

Nokia N75 us a smartphone with Symbian OS.

Technically, but it was useless for any of the things that we use in smart phones. It had terrible web browsing, no GPS. Very few apps outside of games. T9 typing (which should have disqualified it in the first place). It was a camera phone that they tried to upsell as a smartphone and a big part of why Nokia lost so much market to Apple and later Android.

Smartphones used to have a different purpose than they do now. Just because it doesn't have a querty keyboard, doesn't mean it's not a smartphone. Just look at the first iPhone, it's just as useless, it didn't even have the ability to install apps (imo it's a must for smartphones) , yet hardly anyone will dispute whether it was a smartphone.

iPhone had gps and mapping and really nice full website browsing, plus bigger storage and music (since we all wanted iPod phones before then).

I’d argue one of the bigger factors in its success was that it had an unlimited data plan (which I never should have let go of).

The N75 may have had Bluetooth, the OS, and a browser, but lacked the UI to use it. It was a camera phone marketed as a smartphone because it launched right after the first iPhone.

I never used N75, but i had n95, and they're both running Symbian OS so I assume they were similar at least in software. I had full website browsing (made faster thanks to opera mini), email, file manager. I also had third party apps like Skype, Google maps (doesn't matter whether you have gps), Gmail. If that's not a smartphone then I don't know what is.

Even the wiki you linked to clearly defines it as a smartphone. Why would you argue with that?

Newegg used to sell this one dumb phone for like $12. Completely unbranded garbage but it made calls and did sms.

My brother used to lose his phone or drop it in the toilet constantly. We had like 3 or 4 of that crappy phone just because he kept doing stupid stuff.

I had Nokia 2720 and I had ported DOOM to it.

It was meh. No OS updates in forever, and T9 sucks.

Got my first smartphone in 2017. My first dumbphone in 2008. Late to both parties.

I don't remember the name, but it was some Samsung phone with a relatively low resolution touch screen and a slide out keyboard. I got so good at texting with the slide out keyboard, god I miss those.

I had a Sony Ericsson W595i before my first smartphone (which was a Vodafone 845)

I loved Sony Ericssons, had a bunch of them, because they were extremely moddable through VKP patches. it ran Doom natively 😄

Probably Siemens C65 as my first smartphone was Siemens SXG75.

But later I got a Sony Ericsson K800 which is a feature phone, then I got a more mainstream smartphone Nokia N95 8Gb.

Some kind of Sony Erickson phone, don't recall the model, or if that was the model name.

I believe it was this guy, an LG Cosmos 2. I recall it being not great. But it was infinitely nicer to type on than any phone I've had since so there's that.

Nokia E71 with the full QWERTY keyboard. Loved it, even though the keys were too small to comfortable use. I guess technically speaking that's still a smartphone so before that I had some Samsung flip phone, can't remember the exact model

Wow. I totally don't remember and now you're making me wish I did. It was a red flip phone, but I don't even know what company made it.

Likely LG, that was my first cell phone too.

I'm looking on Google and that doesn't look right. There's a Nokia one which looks kind of like what I remember, but I'm not sure.

My second one was a Nokia 3310, the brick. I accidentally broke the LG and was given that by a friend.

I also had the Alias 2, and then it became my mom's phone after I moved on to my first smartphone (HTC One M7). Loved that stupid double flipping thing to death, such a great design with the e-paper or w/e for the buttons so they could change for the different perspective / context.

Samsung D900 was my last dumbphone. It was pretty cool. But my fav is still the Moto Razr v3.

I was late to the cell phone game and never got a "nice" dumb phone. I had a crappy TracFone. Reception was okay. Texting was torture. Bought an HTC Droid around 2010-2011 and never looked back.

I had a Motorola ROKR Z6, which was kinda like the RAZR, but a vertical slider, rather than a flip phone. It was ok, but eventually the dpad like, fell off or something. I don't remember exactly, but it just became unusable at some point.

A Nokia 5310, before moving over to a ZTE blade gen1. Really liked the XpressMusic phones, and their proper headphone out and proper signal levels when using it. Trying to use the aux on car stereos with any following smartphones before my current Xperia 5 III was hopeless, since the maximum voltage levels were so low you had to turn the amplifier volume up to 11 just to hear anything...

Man, I don't remember the exact model, but it was a newer black Nokia phone I think. I remember the one before it though, the OG Motorola Razr flip phone.

samsung c6112 to samsung galaxy y s5360

Sony Ericsson k610i -> Samsung Galaxy S2

I really like the Galaxy. It was a really good size for a smartphone.

Motorola A1200, black one. Not exactly dumb phone but it wasn't Android either. I love that device. Sadly they were never cheap, now days included. They are full Linux phone with GSM modules in kernel and no restrictions what so ever, so they are super popular with GSM hackers.

Nit sure what it was called, but I'm pretty sure that not only it's the last Qwerty keyboard phone i used, it's also one of the last phone Nokia sold in my country.

Nokia E52 And before that Sony Ericsson W200 And even before that Mitsubishi M320