My first smartphone was the Nokia 7610 that was gifted to me sometime in 2004.
It had a 176x208 screen with support for 65K colours. It had 8 MB RAM and 64 MB of storage.
It ran on Symbian Series 60 2nd Edition. I don’t think there was an app store. I remember getting J2ME apps/games off of third party stores. Note the presence of RealPlayer:
In terms of applications, I had a J2ME version of Google Maps, which was very impressive in 2004; this was when paper maps were still commonly used. The J2ME version of Gmail also felt very futuristic.
It had a browser that could access the regular web (not just WAP). Vast majority of websites had no mobile friendly views, but websites were somewhat simpler then. Google Search did have a good mobile web version as did Google News (if I remember correctly). Keypad navigation actually worked much better than you think it would.
I did listen to MP3s on the Nokia 7610, but you could only put a few on the phone. You technically could also watch videos, but I never tried it.
I believe I kept using this phone all the way till 2007-2008 when I switched to another Symbian device. I only switched to Android with 4.x when I got the HTC One X in 2012.
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A hand-me-down Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini, after that a hand-me-down Samsung Galaxy S3. Huge technological leaps over a couple of years coming from a Sony Ericsson W595
Mine was a green Motorola that my dad bought for $5 at an auction.
Nokia E7 had it for a year or so until it was stolen.
Bloody brilliant phone!
Loved the keyboard, made you look like a hacker when using Putty Touch to SSH into a shell server and run screen irssi to get on IRC.
After it got stolen I got a Nokia Asha 300 as my main phone and a Nokia E72 as a device to access internet radio (SLAYradio still slays!), and yt (at 140p) as it used a mobile broadband SIM with unlimited data but no phone service.
A year or so later I cancelled my mobile broadband and switched to the E72 full time, and a few years later when I got a new job and my E72 died completely I bought myself my first iPhone…
I had an iPod Touch for years. It wasn’t really a smart ‘phone’ though. My first real smartphone was a Nokia Lumia 640 with Windows Phone 8 (later Windows Phone 10). My family got four of them for $25 a piece on AT&T Go and I unlocked them all. I HATED Windows 8 on desktop, but I still appreciate how different Windows Phone was from the boring iOS and Android designs.
(Not my actual phone/wiki image)
I had a Sony Ericsson P800 ~2004. I ordered it from eBay from someone in Europe second hand IIRC.
No one around me had a smart phone back then. I got it to track my business contacts for auto body stuff like what used car lots I cold called when and who I talked to. There were a lot of people that argued about how their tiny dumb thin and flip phones were the greatest, but I got the last laugh.
The P800 was a resistive touch screen and overall was pretty terrible compared to now. It was clear to see the limitations of resistive touchscreen tech. It was easy for me to see that capacitive touch was going to change the world even before Apple jumped on that train early. Capacitive touch and Nvidia with AI are the two times I could have bet the farm and would have… if I owned a farm. It simply fit a need and a separate palm organizer and iPod seemed redundant.
My dad had a P800 for a few years, he hated it almost as much as he hated the Blackberry he was forced to use for a few months…
I thought the cutoff for Smartphones was Android/iOS/(Windows Phone)?
It becomes hard to draw a line otherwise. I had a few various Sony Ericsson non-Android phones back in the day, but the first phone I would call a smartphone was a ZTE Blade. It put me down the path of developing apps for Android, which is what I do for a living now, so that’s a little interesting.
S60 series were definitely smartphones. You could install 3rd party apps/games. You could use a web-browser. I believe there was an email client (I just used the Gmail J2ME app and never bothered configuring the client). You could listen to music and watch extremely basic video, I think I even installed a 3rd party audio player.
I would argue it’s clearly a smartphone, less refined and without a touchpad, but still having a lot of the functionality that modern day smartphones have.
I remember running some J2ME-stuff on the Sony Ericsson-phones, but it was generally quite incapable. Maybe it was a lack of creativity on my part, but then again, I was in my teens at this point
My first “real” phone was the HTC Hero. Slow as heck and had a random trackball that I never used. Loved it though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HTC_Hero_(CDMA_-_Sprint).jpg
For me it was HTC Tattoo, Hero’s cheaper younger brother.
It had the same type of touch screen as the Nintendo DS, so it was made of soft plastic with no multitouch.
My main annoyance with it was that HTC stopped releasing software updates almost immediately, in a time when Android was rapidly developing. So I ended up flashing my own ROM when their promised upgrades never came. Then, when the hardware failed, they refused to repair it because of the custom ROM. That’s when I knew smartphones were going to be shit.
My first smart phone was the Nexus 1. Still have 2 of them although they’re not functional anymore.
A second hand Handspring visor prism, although it needed the phone springboard pack to actually be a phone.
Mine was a BlackBerry Bold.
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