Throwback Tech: Old school cell phones

We can all recall our very first cell phone. I remember vividly that mine was the Nokia 918. Google “Nokia Brick,” and you’ll see it. If I dropped by phone, the only damage that would occur was to the floor, as the phone would stay fully intact. My old Nokia was fully functional, allowing me to make mobile calls, store contacts, and make voice recordings, but my favorite feature was the Snake game; it was so fun to manipulate the undulating pixelated snake so it would wind around the screen and collect the small black dots. Everything on this phone was in black and white, of course, but still, I loved my Nokia all the same.

Let’s take a look back at some of our favorite vintage phones that we’ve gone through over the years:

Nokia phones

Image via Wikipedia

The first Nokia cell phone was released in 1987, named the Mobira Cityman 150 NMT-900. Nokia developed its cell phones throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, making the phones more advanced and more compact.

Check out some of these other vintage Nokia models:

Razr

Razrs first hit the market in 2003, and became the best-selling flip phone model of all time. They came in black, silver, and pink with a small preview screen on the outside, and a regular screen on the inside. It even had a camera installed!  My old pink Razr circa 2005 never held its charge for more than 2 hours, so I was forced to carry its charger with me everywhere. Overall, it was a mediocre phone that looked cool.

Motorola still releases phones under the Razr title, but they’re now touch-screen phones that resemble Androids.

Nextel Walkie-Talkie

Nextel provided a direct calling feature in the late 1990s and early 2000s that provided an all-digital network walkie-talkie service that worked between compatible phones in a 6-mile radius. These phones were  like purchasing Cobra walkie-talkies and paying a monthly fee for them. Walkie-talkie phones still exist today.

Motorola V70

This phone looked like a communication device beamed out of a sci-fi movie. It had a swinging cover that you’d flip up 180º to open.

Sidekick

Sidekicks were the “it” phones to have in the late 2000s. T-Mobile’s devices were GPRS/EDGE smartphones manufactured by Danger Incorporated. The OS software run on the phone was called “Hiptop,” and the company eventually partnered with Sharp. The phone included downloadable software applications, e-mail hosting, instant messaging, and Internet capabilities. The Sidekick revolutionized texting, as it flipped around to reveal a full-sized keyboard. 

An interesting tidbit is that in 2009, users’ Sidekick data lost all functionality, causing many people to lose personal data. Within a few days, Danger’s sync website allowed users to restore their data.

enV VX9900

Verizon’s enV was the lovechild of an original Blackberry RIM 850 and a Sony Ericsson, as manufactured by LG. With an LCD display, 2.0-megapixel camera with flash, Bluetooth, and USB capabilities, the Env appealed to many consumers. The face of the phone resembled a vintage Nokia, but the inside revealed a large screen with a mini-sized keyboard. It also had the option of a purchasable web browsing plan.  The first enV in the series sold so well that enV2 and enV3, enV touch models were released.

Blackberry 7210

RIM launched this Blackberry model in 2003 as its first color-display device. It had a resolution of 240 x 160 pixels, 16 Mbytes of storage, and 2 Mbytes of RAM. Users could open documents, Excel, PDFs, and PowerPoint files since it had a Java platform and browser. The battery usually lasted for two or three days. This model for its time wasn’t that bad!

I am still wondering why this model was blue rather than black. This one should have been called a “Blueberry.”

Sony Ericsson

This phone by Sony was most people’s first color phone. It had a 2-Mpixel camera. Later models like the W900i were Walkman phones that had the option of 30 hours of music playback. This phone was also a great introductory phone for kids hopping onto the mobile bandwagon.