Your First Cellphone

[Greenie]

After reading the Apps thread, I began thinking about cellphones in general, and how they became from so popular to basically an integral part of life. More people than not choose to have it as their main contact everywhere rather than having a phone line at home. Me myself, to be honest.

I remember seeing my first cellphone back when I was fifteen years old. Still pretty much brick sized and obviously all it could do was send calls. As for my first actual cellphone? I was twenty-two years old. I can't even remember the name, but it was a flip phone that fit the palm of my hand. I had bought it simply because I was travelling overseas for a couple of months.

Since then I've had five more phones, one Nokia, two BlackBerry, an obscure Android phone, and finally a Galaxy s5 that I'm still trying to figure out.

Anyway, what about you guys? Do you remember how old you were when you saw/received/bought your first cellphone? How many have you had since then?

 

[Kye]

I was about 15-16 when I got my first cellphone, and it was out of necessity. I went to highschool in a different town from where I lived, and one day I missed my bus home. Neither of my parents were going to be home for a few hours, so I phoned from the school, left them a message that I'd be staying at a friend's house until then, and left his number... But I got the number wrong. So I'm at my friend's, and they're not calling, so I figure they were busy, and I don't really want to call them to hurry cause hey, I don't get to hang out with my friends very often. It was pushing 9-10pm before they called, having tracked down the number from a different friend and gotten the correct one from her. And they were not happy, driving out to pick me up so late...

But I got a cellphone a few days later~ Little blue Samsung. T9 was my best friend. Nothing special, but it granted me more freedom because now my parents could get in touch whenever they needed.

 

[Jorick]

I've only had 3 cell phones, in part because I resisted getting one for a long time because then I would be expected to talk to people on the phone, and ew no thanks. The other reason for only 3 is because I don't have the interest or money to get the hot new models, so I only upgrade when I feel like I really need to and have the money.

My first phone was a knockoff of the classic Nokia brick, can't remember the brand. I got it something like 7 years ago. 6 or 7. I dunnp for sure. It was super basic, had calling and texting, no camera, it had no games and getting any would have required money because it was from before the days of free apps. It was not great, but dependable for making calls.

Then about 3.5 years ago I got my first smartphone... but it wasn't smart enough to be worth attempting to try to use the internet unless you had a wifi connection. It was some lower end model made by Hauwei, and tbh if not for the ability to get some free games from the Android store (fun fact: that phone couldn't upgrade to the version that have the new Google Play store so I wasn't able to get any cool new stuff as it came out) I would have rated it overall equal to the brick phone because the touch screen was imprecise as all hell and made writing texts a bitch.

I got my current phone in January of this year. It's a Motorola model (I think it's called a Moto X) that was also a bit on the lower end when I bought it, bit it's waaay better than the others I've owned. It has a 4G data connection that allows me to be a piece of shit and do internet things at work, I can actually acquire and play games released in the last couple years, it's generally pretty fast, and the touch screen feels precise. It's no super hype $500+ phone, but it's good enough for me.

Oh, also, random phone thing. I've never cracked a phone screen. Not my own, not other people's screens by accident. It's amazing how long they can last if you're careful, and I love saying that to freinds and family with cracked screens.

 

[Dipper]

Sony ericsson when I was thirteen. I remember it vividly-- six texts per day and you had to hit each number twice to get the letter you wanted. But it was one of those sliding phones where you could slide the screen to expose the keyboard. It was very cool at the time. I've only had about two cellphones since, both cheap little pantechs because I can't afford an IPhone.

 

[Hope]

I was 14 when I got my first cell phone and it looked similar to this:

I had special covers, custom buttons, and those silly little pointless things that hung from the yup of them like a keychain. It only made and re wives calls. Oh it did get texts. I was so confused when I get my first text message.

Then I had some kind of flip phone with a terrible camera but played music so thatwas cool back then. Then I went to an iphone, another iphone, and then a Samsung s5 which I still have. It's ok. I debate switching back to the iPhone for some reasons. But there are some things I had absolutely hate about the iPhone so... decisions.

 

[Rainjay]

I'm on my third. I got my first phone in sixth grade. My grandmother got it for me (and she got all my consecutive phones, too). It was a small touch screen phone, black, not a smartphone but it functioned for what I needed. My second was this red phone with a slide out keyboard--that just about everybody had. There were multiple times I'd be at a party and grab somebody else's phone. And then my current one is a LG smartphone. Not a name brand, doesn't act like one, but again; it works enough for me.

 

[Astoria]

I had a Palm Centro as a hand-me-down back in high school. It was like the pre-smartphone when it was new, and it had internet and apps before it was mainstream. I'm still salty that Palm died. >:[

Edit: Right, I had one of those $10 throwaway pay-as-you-go phones back in middle school. It was so useless and unimportant that I forgot I even had one.

 

[Diana]

My first phone was some cheapass thing from walmart that you purchase minutes for, but at least it had texting. I had to get it because my van died and I got stranded there and I had no way to call for help. o___o

I used it for YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS until the battery started to die.

My second phone, which I got about a year ago, is a light blue BLU phone named Elsa. 8D I went cheap and got an older model that had short battery life, because it's not like I EVER use my phone. But it has pictures and video and apps and it's all fancy like everyone's fancy phones.

In fact I've my phone more since pokemon go came out, than for like any other reason. @___@

 

[Kagayours]

I got my first cell phone when I was 15 or 16. It was... decent. Full-fledged smartphones were already a thing at the time, but my parents didn't think I needed one of those, so I got a relatively basic phone. Not exactly the cheapest out there -- it did technically have internet connectivity, but I wasn't allowed to use it because we didn't have a data plan that would cover it. Still, at the time, I was just happy that I had a cell phone that I could at least text my friends with, since, by then, it already seemed like everyone else I knew had a cell phone, to the point where many people were shocked to hear that I still didn't have one. So, I was pretty excited to finally have a cell phone to text my friends with (instead of them having to text to my email anytime they wanted to contact me...), although, this phone didn't have a keyboard, so... I became pretty good at texting using a keypad for quite a while. o_o Although I still think it was a really stupid design choice that you had to press the button four times in order to type the letter S -- probably one of the most commonly-used letters in the English language (excluding vowels). Ugh...

After that, I eventually upgraded to a phone that did have a keyboard, which I was pretty excited about at the time. You know, the kind where you pushed the screen up and then there was a keyboard underneath? Yeah, I liked that. Pretty sure that was the kind of phone that most of my friends had by then, too (or at least... I think it was the kind of phone that most of my friends had when I got my first phone. I think a lot of them had moved on to smartphones by the time I got my 2nd phone...) . I don't remember when I got my 2nd phone, though, since apparently my memories of my early cell phones are surprisingly hazy, and, when I first started typing this, I mistakenly thought that my first two phones were actually just one phone... until I remembered that my very first phone didn't have a keyboard, so, yeah. In any case, I still couldn't use the web browser or download any primitive versions of 'apps' (if apps were even a thing on that kind of phone... which they might not have been), and so, like with my first phone, I could really only use it for calling, texting, and taking pictures, which is probably why the distinction between the two doesn't really stand out in my mind all too much. XD

I got an iPhone 5s -- my first real smartphone -- when I was 17, and it's the phone I still have to this day. And, despite the huge upgrade in what the iPhone is capable of compared to my previous phone... I actually didn't start making use of most of that other stuff until fairly recently. I still mainly used it for calling, texting, and taking pictures -- although the camera on this phone is way better than the one on my past two phones (I was seriously shocked by just how astonishingly sharp those pictures were in comparison o_o), and texting was a lot easier, too. I liked having internet access -- and the email app is convenient, so I got in the habit of using that and poking around forums fairly quickly -- but I still never had much of a desire to spend a ton of time online from my phone, especially since I already had a really nice laptop at the time.

I almost never downloaded any apps, either. And, despite having owned the phone for about two years now, I've really only recently started to explore everything this phone can do... And the majority of apps I have that didn't come pre-installed and that I actually downloaded, myself (which would still only be about... six apps) were all things that I downloaded within the past month or two. O_O

I have also never changed my iPhone's background or lock screen ever since I bought it. >.>

 

[Artorias]

I got my first phone at the age of 16-17 because of the High School Golf team, so I was gone for a majority of the day and my parents obviously needed to know when I would be coming back because I didn't have a key to the house. So my first phone was an iPhone 3GS, nothing fancy, and it worked. (I still have it actually as more of an ipod now).

I have only owned 2 phones in my life, the iPhone 3GS and my current phone, which is an HTC M8. Which I still own and works perfectly fine.

 

[Turtle of Doom]

The Motorola Peanut phone. I got it in late 2002. When I was 16

 

[Cosmic Fey]

I got my first phone when I was 17. It was a Samsung with the slide-out keyboard that was popular at the time. My mother and poppa got it for me out of necessity. I lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere, my school and friends were at least a 30 minute drive away in the next city over and my closest relative lived an hour and a half away (she and my grandfather live eight hours away) and I was suddenly by myself as my father and stepmother decided to move closer to her family (I'd chosen to not go with them) and then decided they didn't like living there and fucked off to Saskatchewan with no warning or word. Mom wanted me to be able to contact people in case of emergency, so they got me a phone.

I liked it a lot. I remember my mom sort of apologizing because I had to get the black and green one because they were out of the white and blue and she thought that would be the one I'd pick, until I told her I would have picked the black one anyway because I liked it and because my best friend had the exact same phone but in white and I didn't want to get mixed up.

I had that phone until I was 21 and then was upgraded to a Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone, which I still have. It's served me well this last few years although it took some getting used to since I have small hands.

 

[Sidhe]

This guy for the purposes of parent-child communication only. I constantly pissed my mom off by never having it turned on. I only really started using a cellphone when I got a Samsung Galaxy S2 at age 20.

 

[Shadon Xarian]

My first phone was a firefly (age 7ish I think)

Then I got a flip phone

Then iPhone 5s

And now, Samsung Galaxy s7 edge (best phone evar :D :D :D

 

[Mu]

Hand me down iPhone 4 I got this year. Ancient brick that no longer had updates and lagged a lot. Switched to another old iPhone 5s now, but the battery dies a lot faster : |

 

[Yatagarasu]

An iPhone 4...

That phone went to absolute shite and lagged more than my shitty video driver trying to run Overwatch and Transistor on low graphics setting after 2 fucking years : |

Had to wait another 2 years to get my new phone (iPhone 6S+) which does not lag as much anymore...yayyyyyy

 

[Bomb]

I didn't get my first phone until i was 8th grade, which was like 2010? And what I got was... a Walkman hand me down. It didn't last a long time before it broke down, and I had to get another phone which was.... and even older hand me down.... fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

It was 2 years ago which i finally receive a modern phone which was an iPhone.... 4.... Cmon, parents, stop with the hand me downs!

It wasn't until last year till i actually had the liberty to choose my own phone :|

 

[MurderDeathKill]

Just a shitty little Nokia phone so people could call me when I wasn't at home.

Going from that to a Galaxy S2 was like going from the stone age to the goddamn singularity. You mean I can set my ringtone to be anything I want instead of the shit that came in!? HOLY SHIT.

 

[ᴛᴏᴄᴋᴀ]

An LG flip phone. That's the first one I can remember at least. I've had so many over the years....

 

[Kitti]

I got a silly Nokia brick so that I could call in case of emergencies since I left an empty house to walk to school in the morning and back to the same for a while.
I wasn't allowed to text or anything and I remember being soooo jealous of my friend who could use hers to text (who? I don't know, probably her mum). I played snake on it, though, so that was fun.