Forty years ago today, Martin Cooper demonstrated his new invention, a Motorola cell resound, to the press by placing a phone c tot eithery to his play off at Bell Labs. We’ve come a long substance since indeed, and the anniversary has me feeling a petite nostalgic virtually the phones we’ve known over the years. Sometime in 2002, I slash in love with my first phone. It was the Sony Ericsson T68i, and it was absolutely perfect.
Just consider the eyeglasses: Bluetooth! Two-way MMS! WAP web browsing! E-mail! T9 predictive school text! A full megabyte of onboard storage! And most gloriously? A 256 color 1.3 x 1.1-inch screen. That may not be at all mind-boggling to you now, but back then it was positively amazing.
The T68i was the first great consumer-oriented internet phone. It’s rocky to remember how bad dumb phones, and so-called smartphones, uptaked to be. OK, OK. blackberry bush — er, RIM — had some nice stuff. But Symbian phones? Windows CE phones? Treos? These were the reasons wad hated smartphones. They had terrible interfaces. They were a pain to sync. And worst of all? They screamed “my boss makes me carry this thing.”
The T68i was a people’s phone. If the berry or Treo was the phone you had for work, the T68i was the phone you had for fun. Unlike those business-oriented phones, it eventide looked cool. Again, this may be hard to see in retrospect, but in its day it was a stylish attention getter. It was a stick with phone; Halle Berry carried one in Die some other Day. It was, quite literally, the bomb.
Moreover it was designed for pleasurable connections. MMS was brand new, and the concept of be able to send someone a picture (admittedly, not quite as cool as it could occupy been had the phone had a camera) was at the time amazing. Web browsing was certainly a novel experience at the time. And, years in front you could do it with an iPhone, you could even use the T68i’s Bluetooth connection to jumper lead your computer and connect to the internet — very slowly, of course, but still. It was 2002. You could even connect it to your computer and sync it. I know. Crazy.
Oh. Did I relate you could customize the screen?
This was the first phone that I really spent a lot of time with. The first that I found myself pulling out of my pocket and checking when I didn’t necessarily want to make a call. For better or worse, it was the device that first put the internet in my pocket. And in doing so, it changed the way I interacted online. It wasn’t just a device, it was a new lifestyle. I loved it.
And what’s so peculiar to me today, ten years later, is how commonplace and even hoary all this sounds today. Because despite how much I dug that phone, I have no idea where it eventually wound up. I think, perhaps two or three years ago, after several(prenominal) years in a drawer, I finally dropped it in a bag and sent it off to a recycler. It met an anon. end.
That’s exactly what I try to keep in mind when I find myself getting a little too excited about gadgets today. That T68i was the most amazing thing I’d ever used. And I wouldn’t use it again today on a bet.
Materials taken from WIRED
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