A Brief History of my Smartphones
I used to be a techie. I loved all the cool stuff, and when smart phones came along I was so excited. Finally! A real computer in my pocket. But fast forward sixteen years or so and the gloss has well and truly faded. I think my phone history reflects that. They are just things now. They are no longer exciting.
So here is a quick rundown of all the phones I have owned, and why.
iPhone 3G
This was the first smartphone I bought and I bought it on a whim. From memory, it didn't even cost me anything. Back then you could get the phone company to subsidize your phone and you would only pay half. But I was paying 20 bucks a month for a service I was hardly using and I think I must have got this for 15 dollars a month plus a 5 buck handset fee to pay it back. So I got a state of the art phone for the same monthly price as my current piece of crap. It was a no-brainer.
I remember the sales assistant didn't believe me that I could get that phone on such a cheap plan. I had to fight them to pull up their own website. This was a premium phone and I got it for nothing.
And it was amazing ... For a day or two. And then it just had so many limitations that it never quite lived up to the hype. I remember having to format movies in a different format so they could play, it was next to impossible to get data off the damn thing, it was always a promise of what it could be, not what it was.
I remember sitting at work telling my coworker that it would be really cool if they made one of these things super-big, like notebook sized. A few years later the iPad came out, but by then I was completely jaded by Apple so didn't want anything to do with it.
HTC Evo 3D
A 3D phone! It took 3D pictures and displayed them on the screen so you didn't need to use glasses. Truth be told, it was a great little phone. It still works -- my dad has it, but never uses it. It just sits in a drawer until he gets around to tinker with it. The most frustrating thing about it was the 3D function would only let you take a photo if you held it level. Why? No idea. There was an oak tree that looked perfect for a 3D photo, with gnarly branches all twisted around itself. I thought would look amazing as a 3D photo, but the stupid camera kept saying "hold the phone level".
Not for the last time was I held back by technology thinking it knew better than I did.
Samsung Note 3
This was the first phone that I absolutely loved. I remember seeing my coworkers Note 2 and thinking just how amazing it looked, and I coveted it. When the Evo starting fraying around the edges it didn't take long for me to upgrade.
And what an upgrade!
The Note 3 was the first phone that really made use of the phablet style, and made other manufacturers take notice. Every phone since has been almost the same dimensions as the Note 3. The stylus felt like a gimmick but with the Sketchpad drawing app it was great. I drew a picture book for my kids with this phone, ten years after it was released. I still have the phone, it sits on my desk. I have changed the battery and the stylus nibs and that's about it. I still love this phone. My kids love the phone; they love drawing with it.
The only reason I 'upgraded' it was because I dropped it at a bad angle and the camera glass cracked, so I could no longer take photos. As a parent of young children, I take a lot of photos. So now it is just a Creator's Phone -- a phone only for creation, drawing, writing, that kind of thing.
Oppo r11s
Did I mention I have kids? And so the first of my budget phones arrived. It was an okay, perfectly fine phone. I got it because the reviews said that the cameras were good -- and they were. This thing took lovely photos. Everything else was fine. I no longer play games, so I didn't need much processing power. It was just a phone.
Eventually the power button stopped working reliably so I thought I had better upgrade before it became non-functional. I gave it to my kids.
It lasted about a year before it was completely broken. Now it is in the trash. My first phone that actually broke.
Samsung Galaxy a23
Another budget phone. I chose this one because my work got the same phone to use as our app testing phone, so I got to try before I bought it. It was a good phone, but the build quality of the internals was poor. Unlike the Note 3, this started showing problems within 6 months: namely, the charger port stopped working properly.
I don't know if this was actually a problem with the phone or a problem with me. I think I got dirt in it, and never really managed to get that dirt out. So I could never transfer data via USB and I couldn't use Samsung official cables and chargers, because it wouldn't charge. Third party chargers were fine.
The phone worked great but, last Friday, the USB charger completely stopped and no amount of cleaning would bring it back. I only realised when the 15% battery alert came on. By the time I got a chance to back up my data, it was down to 1% ... And then zero.
My second phone to die. And how much of this was because of my new life with small children and their filthy, grubby hands? I don't know, but I knew I couldn't justify spending money on a phone so the next phone was ...
Motorola G85 5G
... A sub-$250 phone. I would normally not get something in the 'so cheap it is rubbish' department but, for some reason, this phone isn't rubbish. It's fast. The camera is fine. It has a beveled screen. It has NFC. (Alas, it doesn't do wireless charging -- which would have also kept my Samsung alive, if I could charge the damn thing.)
I think we have officially hit the age of Smartphones as Whitegoods. They will all do what you need them to do. Excitement is dead. Perhaps that's fine, but I do miss the days where each release was an exciting upgrade and worth the money. My next phone will also be a cheap one, because what am I going to get for my money? I just don't have the need for anything fancy, even if it existed.
But I hope that this phone survives long enough to become a plaything for my children ... In about ten years time.