I never had a G1 but i did have some really good non-smartphones before my first smartphone. i had gone through a pretty big luddite period after a bad experience with pocket PCs and various other mobile tech, and the idea of a 'smartphone' was reminding me so much of the Apple Newton especially when Apple first advertised the iPhone.
these are not exactly in order but:
1. Nokia 5185i [Verizon]. a lowly CDMA AMPS/Digital dual-band phone with a mono screen, Snake for a game, and was good enough to do basic sending/receiving text and email messages, voice mail and phone calls. i probably had this one longer than any other and often went back and forth between it and any other model listed. it was the most reliable, unbreakable (although in its last year of life the battery needed duct tape to stay attached to the phone after dropping it often) and since it was obsolete more recently, parts were easy to find and super cheap as this model interchanged with so many like it. the Nokia 5100-series was probably the most popular and versatile during the era it was around. later on, Verizon discontinued support for it, AMPS mobile networks got shut down, and since it was e911 non-compatible, hardly anyone would activate it. luckily Page Plus, a new MVNO in town, supports older handsets for retro lovers, and the digital mode still worked just fine. it was lucky to get more than 4 hours on a battery (that is standby lol) because it was aging badly. my first year of work during the year 2009 was the last year i used it. i think it still may be stored away in my closet with some of the cheap junk from that time. i was pretty tin-foil hat then and i just refused to use a newer model as i hated the idea of being tracked via my phone's GPS and all the more recent ones had that in there and it could not be disabled, of course, this isn't the GPS that one uses for navigation today, it was just there to track you should you make a 911 call or if the police wanted to use it to track a potential suspect. i was very uncomfortable with it at the time.
2. Nokia 6800 [GSM 1900/850] One of the models i used in between #1, and not for very long. this was perhaps the coolest model at the time. remember Cingular Wireless? the year was 2004. i got this one for well over $100 on the street, and popped my SIM in it (a hack to switch handsets before AT&T here locked it to the IMEI and rendering that trick useless today) and it had it all. web browser, MP3/polyphonic ringtones, even email that worked with Hotmail, Pop3, and Yahoo! (Gmail didn't exist yet) it was the coolest toy to date. a smartphone inspiration for sure. fold out the keyboard, and what appeared to be yet another dull candybar phone with a color screen would instantly sprout a full QWERTY keypad that would make any BlackBerry addict jealous, and the screen would rotate to landscape. while it did not grant the user any more screen real-estate, it did make it super easy to punch in website addresses, and helped immensely for email. unfortunately it was not nearly as solid as the 5185i, and being a deer lover, i visited a pet that someone had and she thought the keypad was a treat and munched on it. while it did not destroy the phone, the moisture did have a weird effect that made Cingular reps laugh and give a free phone to replace it, what happened was the drool caused the phone to do many things on its own. it first manifested itself as people calling me and asking why the heck i called and hung up on them. bewildered, i denied any such accusation stating i do not believe in prank calls especially at the expense of minutes on my plan! how crazy could they be? well, while it was sitting on a table at a restuarant, i noticed the screen light up, dialing my mother. trying to cancel it with a 'WTF? it never did THIS before!' look on my face, the phone froze. pulling the battery i thought nothing of it, until it tried to dial 911!!! pulling the battery again before it could do that, i figured 'well, if i lock the screen with a 4-digit PIN, there is NO WAY it can unlock itself and call! it's not that smart! well, much to my amazement, no more than one minute after it said 'Keypad Locked with PIN' it unlocked and tried dialing my voice mailbox. oh, but wait, there's more! the email app mentioned? there were three or four mail messages that were literally 'stuck' on the device. i could still open them, read them, but trying to delete them resulted in a 'message does not exist' error message. could not delete them. some mail which was later recieved also got stuck. apparently the Nokia 6800 series was not too friendly with deer drool
3. Samsung SGH-x427 [GSM 1800/850] lamenting the loss of my previous device, which still comes off as one of my favorites, and that old deer having died and the year being 2005, i got this one as a replacement. and it to this day remains one i wish i never gave up. this one was not as cool as a hidden QWERTY keypad and i had to re-adjust to T9 text input all over again, but still this one remains my most favorite aside the 5185i. it was an average flip phone, was not that sophisticated. it didn't even support MMS. no camera (which was quite common and pretty expensive then) and not even a caller ID screen. odd since answering happened automatically upon flipping it open so no matter what, you couldn't ignore a call without answering then hanging up, which was rather rude. aside the setbacks, it had perhaps the most amazing ringtone assortment, one of the best being 'sounds of spring' which had an 80's beat to it. i wish to this day it was able to be downloaded somewhere to my Android phone as i really liked that tone. in addition was the introduction of 'live wallpapers' (long before Android, i may add). most of the included backgrounds had animations, such as a butterfly landing on a daisy, or fish swimming, etc. it had excellent color. they were choppy though as limited by hardware. it also had user-customizable flip open ringtones. i remember impressing so many then with my Star Trek communicator sound when i got a call, the hinge was loose enough that i could, in Kirk posture, flip it open, and with it auto-answering made it even more authentic, even if it was unable to be disguised as a communicator itself. battery life was excellent, and despite the lacks, it did feature a much better browser, app support limited only by Cingular's picks, and i just adored those tones. my grandmother still has hers, same model, and it ages pretty well. the chrome highlights and open screen still look pretty techy. and her battery still works. unfortunately, i had it no longer than the 6800 before a trip through a washer from me forgetting it was in my jeans pocket killed it, and back to the 5185i it was.
4. Motorola MicroTAC [AMPS only]
This one was only used for a short time. year? 2007. it was not yet the analog cut-off, and i found this one for $2 at a garage sale. easy to activate, over landline (Cingular wouldn't touch it in store!) i really thought the dot-matrix display was cool as heck! the rubber pull-out antenna was neat for better signal, but it grew boring really quick. ringtones were limited to various borg-style sound effects and a standard cordless phone style default. menus were super cryptic and not exactly english, most abbreviated. (Settings was like SET 1-9) and the battery was barely usable, not surprising as this phone was new back in the 1980s! if you think Android battery life stinks, you should own a MicroTAC!
5. iPhone 3GS
Fast-forward back to 2009, i realized my 5185i was too tired to keep on a keepin' on. my retro life was nearing its end and my boss handed me an iPhone 3GS since my Nokia's battery was so far gone he was sick of dropped calls when it would die as he attempted to call or text me. this was my intro to smartphones. and for a time i loved this phone. i could for the first time do all i could do with my Pocket PC but far more reliable. GPS? an app for that. music? an app for that! camera! oh wow! battery life was not too good as iPhone 4.x was not very efficient, and i needed to jailbreak to even put a background wallpaper on there. there was a new deer friend in my life too, and i wanted her picture as the background and lockscreen. so i jailbroke for the first time. eventually my love of Star Trek came forth and i had a very neat LCARS theme on there so functional you'd swear it were an actual PADD! unfortunately while iOS was stable, it got boring really fast! apps no longer were cutting it to make up for the lack of features, and this phone did some kind of self-discharge every month on the day of activation (say it was activated June 2009 15, it would discharge on its own the 15th of each month) and since nothing showed on the screen when in standby, i would likely be greeted by the dead battery with plug symbol if i tried to wake it to make a call or check the weather. then it repeatedly did the dreaded 'Invalid SIM' error. replacing three SIMs in one year is not cheap and not convenient. i decided i'd buy my own smartphone and gave the iPhone back to the boss
6. BlackBerry Curve 9310 [Virgin Mobile/Sprint]
My first smartphone, and for only $100?! unlimited data? win! oh and how wonderful, a retro-themed OS! no rooting/jailbreak required! weather widget? WOW! let's see the 3GS do that! battery life is perfect! a week and it's still half charged! well, once the 'oh neat i got a new phone!' phase wore off, i realized how sucky the BlackBerry really was. oh sure it had a QWERTY keypad like my Nokia 6800, sure. it did everything my iPhone could do, oh wait, no Angry Birds?! what?! no more storage?! i couldn't have used all of 930KB already could i??? wtf? it just froze for the 15th time!!! no signal?! not only did the brick run only on Sprint, which was one huge dead zone when i moved my trailer home to a new address (which has recently gotten service--three years later) but BlackBerry was the creator of 'battery pull' the device would always freeze regardless of what one was doing with it, and always required one to pull out the battery and restart it, which for a BlackBerry could mean anywhere from 10 to an hour to restart. it hardly had any worthy apps unless you were one of the guys on the cover of Forbes, as in stock quotes, news, weather, email, etc. it had hardly any games. it did have some rather badly coded copycats though, but all of them stank. no wonder RIM is in the toilet today. it was around when people were still tapping away at old analog phones
Well, that is pretty much it, i am currently on my third Android phone and i have spoken so much in one post i am not going into the two priors unless one wants to know. my Galaxy Precedent happens to be the most reliable and affordable handset i own to this day, and hopefully will remain with me for as long as the Nokia 5185i did, that is, if i can stay far away from the Android counter at Best Buy
