See also: Computers
A list of cell phones, smart phones, and related non-computer devices I've owned.
| Model |
|---|
| Motorola C350 |
| BenQ-Siemens S68 |
| iPod Nano 2G |
| Sony-Ericsson W760i |
| LG Nexus 5 |
| Google Pixel 3a |
| iPhone 6 |
| Google Pixel 10a |
GSM cell phone with a color screen.
Nominally a plain GSM/EDGE cell phone, but in truth it was the first portable general-purpose computing device that I owned, and was used far more to read fanfics and hacker textfiles than an actual phone.
It was a major upgrade from the Motorola in that it had not only an XHTML-capable web browser (basic, but still), but also a real file manager. Unlike older phones which were largely limited to a fixed-function picture gallery, the S68? just had regular files and folders, and a whole 16 MB of storage that I could manage over USB or Bluetooth OBEX-FTP.
Though both the built-in browser and the file manager were quickly substituted
by more capable J2ME apps such as Opera Mini and Moby Explorer; the latter had
both a convenient text viewer and even an FTP client (for downloading even more
files from etext.org, of course).
At some point I had even installed an SSH client (MidpSSH) and an IRC client (jmirc), so I could stay on IRC even in the middle of a class, or do basic stuff on a shell account.
Unfortunately, it was also what led to some realizations about growing up and anger management.
Portable music player.
At some point I converted it to run Rockbox (which provided better battery life and no longer required the proprietary iTunes sync), and of course loaded it with even more textfiles and fanfics, reading whole books on its little 176x132 screen.
Another GSM/3G cell phone. I would consider it a "proto-smartphone", as it had a fairly decent web browser, extensive J2ME support with multitasking (not only the ability to minimize apps, but also to have them continue running in background, which was supported by Skype)c and of course a proprietary dongle in place of the 3.5mm headphone jack, even though it was a Walkman series phone of all things.
Much like the previous phone, the W760i felt sufficiently as a general-purpose device. It had a decent file management UI, its NetFront web browser could handle larger websites and even rudimentary Flash animations (although Opera Mini was still necessary most of the time), and the 320x240 screen was enough to re-watch a movie.
Oddly, the "Walkman" features were easily the worst parts of the phone. Requiring a dongle to connect headphones was an odd choice. It also had a dedicated button to open a media browser (with a crossbar interface that Sony liked at the time), but for some reason the media UI was awfully slow, even straight out-of-the-box.
It did not have Wi-Fi (though a few similar models did), nor did we have
Wi-Fi at home yet for that matter, but it did have support for Bluetooth
PAN networking – both as host for "tethering" and as client – so I
could in theory save on (still costly at the time) my GPRS data quota by
connecting to pand running on my (Ethernet-wired) laptop, although
the PAN implementation was too fickle to be practical.