What was the last dumb phone you had before your first smartphone?
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.
Bring back sliders with full keyboards
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.
Is f(x)tec actually a thing? Like have they actually started shipping phones to customers?
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.
or BlackBerry key approach
I miss those... ༎ຶ‿༎ຶ
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.
I still have my champagne Razr around here somewhere. It works, even looks pretty new.
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)
Nokia 3310
This was mine, which I used from 2001 until 2011. I loved that phone
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
I always liked the color.
I would not call these on the picture "dumb phones" though.
I had a Motorola phone. I actually liked it because it had a really good camera. The native photo editor was also top notch at the time.
They were called "feature phones" at the time.
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 had a pink Moto SLVR L7
I had the same model but in black. I still have it somewhere.
Same! I'm pretty sure that was also my smallest phone, before they started going the other direction.
LG Env, I actually miss it.
I had the env2. Hands down, my favorite phone to date.
Oh ya I remember wanting that one a lot! I think it was too expensive for me at the time, so ended up with the alias 2 but I envied anyone who had one of those.
ENV2 gang. Great phone.
LG enV... Clamshell phone with a full keyboard when opened... God, that phone was awesome
The enV3 was either my last or one of them. Yeah, it was pretty great.
enV 2 for me, used that thing until my senior year in 2013
Motorola Razr babyyyyy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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."
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.
I had a Sony Ericsson too as my last dumb phone but I don't remember the model. I just remember it slides out to reveal the number pad and that it was great for music.
I found mine here, I'm sure you'll recognize yours: https://m.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson-phones-19.php
A Nokia Ngage , it was a Gameboy phone combo
Last time in my life that I was cool.
Adding that to my handheld gaming wishlist! 👍
Wow that does kinda look like a Gameboy Advance just with way more buttons!
A Moto Razr I think, my first smartphone was a Palm Centro.
Moto Razr in silver was my first phone ever! Loved the design of it!
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.
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.
Sony Ericsson W580i
Finally got a free Android when digital got under $20/mo.
https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-sch-a950-verizon-wireless-review/
This beast. Yeah, it has an mp3 player in it so I could put all my tunes from Kazaa on there.
I miss my Alias 2, best phone I've ever owned.
It was such a joy to text on it!
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.
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 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
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.
I miss slide out keyboards. Touch typing is trash bro.
An Apple iPhone! Hahaha, I kid. . . . . I use Arch, btw.
Sony Ericsson w810 -> iPhone 3g.
My First and last iPhone
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.
Is Nokia 5230 a smartphone? It didn't feel very smart
Dude I loved my Envy 2, played so much Tetris in the bathroom at work!
BlackBerry Pearl
Blackberry pearl is a smartphone, at least according to Wikipedia. I've never used it, but I'd say all blackberries were smartphones.
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.
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.
How dumb? OG Motoroloa RAZR V3 > Nokia N96 before I had an iOS or Android device.
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.
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.
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.
Nokia n70. Still think about it sometimes, it was a great little phone.
I used Nokia N79. Nokia N series had some amazing phones.
Sony-Ericsson J110i. Still have it somewhere.
I would argue im still using a dumb phone because it sure aint smart
I had this sweet thing, I was the coolest kid on the block I tell ya.
That appears to be running Android tho 😄 (granted Gingerbread, a very old version) but I don't think that counts as a "dumb" phone haha
