A question on Formspring got me thinking about old phones I've had. I'm gonna try remember every phone I've ever had.
Nokia 5110
Christ, this is nostalgia at its best. This was one of the few phones around the time that had games on it. Snake was the ultimate game on the roads. I was the only kid to have this phone then so everyone wanted to use it. One of the few, if not the only, phones you could change the front facia of. I had this only 2 weeks when while playing Diddy Kong Racing in my mate Anto's gaf, I beat him by like a fraction of a second in a race and he went mental and everyone was laughing and everyone started wrestling and stuff. He accidentally stood on my phone which was in my pocket and broke it. I went home crying. I got a new one but it was traumatic. Brick. Absolute powerhouse of a phone. If this phone was a football player it would have been Paul Ince; Black, solid as hell in the middle, but ultimately you got rid of it once something with a little style came along.
B.
Nokia 3210
I don't even know if I owned this phone but again, around that time there was a feature of this phone that endeared people to me because of my ability to use it. This was one of the first phones along with the Siemens C25 that allowed you to create your own ringtones. The shorthand system for denoting keys and notation values was bloody mental but I had it sussed and since I knew a little bit of music theory at the time I could transpose the main motif from most pop songs to ringtones. But the real niche market was people asking me to do songs by like blink-182 and NFG and stuff. I spent so long doing Adam's Song I can't believe it. Pretty poor phone otherwise. Built like a turd and broke as easily as a hymen. You could change both sides of the facia on this one though so it was kinda cool for that.
C+
Nokia 3310
This I definitely owned anyway. It was like a beefier, less gammy looking, less flimsy 3210. It had the same ringtone rubbish going for it so my grasp on that market hadn't suffered. However by the time I got this, a lot of people had started to figure out how to get somewhat decent at making their tones themselves, thus my monopoly on the trade dwindled. However, this phone had a few more games on it. Bantumi, which nobody understood. Don't lie if you had this phone. You didn't understand the game. Space Impact, which ruled. Pairs which was for your aul wan to play, and Snake II. Same game, just the snake looked different and you could collect bonus food things. Great phone in general though. Buttons were so well laid out and real easy to press. Dual facia change and all. I had it for a good while I think...
B
Nokia 3410
Now this lad... Finally a symmetrical phone for me... The buttons weren't as nice and prominent as the 3310 but the Pinball game on this. Oh my god. My whole Leaving Cert was spoiled because of this. Usual stuff on the phone. I don't think I ever changed the facia of this because I was past that nonsense by that stage. I can't really remember why I loved this phone so much but it was my be all and end all for so long. I think it was around that time that mobiles became pretty much indispensable as social accessories in Ireland. From 4th year on, or whenever I had gotten it, I was lost without my mobile and it's always been that way since. I think maybe this phone held more messages than before. Wikipedia tells me games ran slower on this phone. Weird. So what. That Pinball game. Oof.
B+
Nokia 3510
The Ivan Drago of phones.
Games sucked. Looked like dick. Horrible buttons. You simply could not break this phone though. I got beaten up with this phone before. I'm sure plenty of lads have been beaten up BY this phone before. It's like they made a phone, knew there was some air space inside and injected collagen into its pores. Completely solid.
D-
Sony J6
My first non-Nokia phone. You might notice it has no arrow keys on the front. That's because all navigation was done with a side scroll wheel. This is the only picture I could find with a visible shot of it. It seems ridiculous, but it was dead handy. You could navigate through the reems of texts and find old stuff people had said and call them up on it. So naturally, if you know me, this is where it stemmed from. Amazing phone. It's the lightest phone I've ever owned, and amazingly, far more resilient than any phone previous, despite being so flimsy light. One time I was up in my friend Philly's bedroom with a bunch of friends, and nobody had credit and one of the girls was hassling me to use my phone because she wanted to call her friend or some rubbish and she saw me texting. She was bugging me something fierce, so I threw my phone out the window. Worked perfectly afterwards. Amazed it wasn't stolen. Tallaght natives can smell a loose phone from 500 yards away. I'm pretty sure this phone lasted me the longest of any I'd had before.
A-
That Motorola phone.
I never had it but I remembered people in school having it.
If you had it...
F
Not the phone. You.
F
I'm gonna have to finish this blog off another time because there's some phones back in my parents' house I used to own and I want to keep this going chronologically...
