Stevie’s Blog

Writing this post is probably going to make me feel old. (Amended slightly to correct the timeline)

I’m in the middle of a “Digital Clean Up” (it’s not even spring), going through all my old backups, re organising and getting rid of anything I don’t need.

As I scrolled through old files, I found the following picture, 4 of my old mobile phones, or cellphones if you prefer.

This brought back some instant memories of where it all started.

Back In 1997 when I was roughly 12, I remember going into town with my dad, at the time I didn’t know what we were going in for. To my surprise and disbelief, it was to get my first mobile phone. This was pretty much unheard of in the UK in 1997.

Like most 12 year olds back then, I was never in the house, we weren’t allowed in the house, if we were going out, we were out all day, once we were back “In” or home, that was it, so we stayed out all day,

My parents wanted an easy way to stay in contact with me, which led them to purchasing my first mobile phone, a Philips Diga, Pay As You Go (PAYG) running on the BT Cellnet network, ah memories.

The mobile usage rules were strict though, only short essential phone calls and no texting or SMS messages as it was known back then, as they cost 49p per message! This wasn’t really an issue, phones were a rarity for most in 1997 and texting was not really established. If you did text, it was limited to 140 characters and took ages to type each letter. On top of that the phone could only hold about 20 messages.

Those were the days! I can still remember my first phone number.

For my second mobile phone, I moved into the Philips Savvy and over to the newly established Virgin Mobile network, I spent ages trying to find that phone as it was out of stock everywhere, I eventually found it in the Virgin Megastore in Gatwick Airport.

If memory serves, texts had dropped to 10p per message and were becoming more popular, still limited though as you were paying every time.

My third mobile phone was a Siemens C35i, I know still no sign of a Nokia, bear with me! If memory serves, this was my first phone with WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). Essentially very very rudimentary internet access on a mobile device.

The Siemens C35i also saw me switch network to Orange, they were right, the future was bright, it just wasn’t Orange. The big news here was, with PAYG I could send not one, but FIVE free text messages a day, after that it was 5p a message.

Honestly, we had no concept of unlimited free messaging, 5 messages a day felt like I had won the lottery.

Onto my fourth mobile phone, starting to get a bit more exciting now. An upgrade to the Siemens S55, my first colour screen! Wow what a game changer.

But wait, it was also my first mobile phone with a camera! That’s right, I could take photos, with my phone. Unfortunately the camera was an accessory that you had to plug in each time, which meant I never used it. But it was a good concept!

Ok, ok, I finally saw the light.

My fifth mobile phone introduced me to my first Nokia and my departure from PAYG jumping into the big world of my first mobile phone contract and the Nokia 6600.

First the contract, another network change, over to O2.

I signed up to a 24 month off peak contact, with, wait for it, 1,000 free text massages and 500 free minutes in the evening and weekends! Woohoo this is amazing. I want to say it cost £25 per month, but don’t quote me on that.

1,000 free messages, I’d never use all of those surely. Well turns out I absolutely did, had to rein myself back in. Talking only off peak was tricky as well, but I did it.

The Nokia 6600 was a chunky boy, big screen, nice colours, really nice to use. It finally had a built in camera, in more plugging it in, a really big improvement.

My sixth device introduced me to the most interesting mobile phone i’ve ever had, but hey, that’s me.

Let me explain myself a little, I always try and choose functionality over style (probably one of the reasons I’m single). I’m more about what can this mobile phone do for me, rather than what it looks like.

At the time I wanted a device that could send emails and make typing those emails and text messages easier. With that in mind, I wanted a phone with a keyboard.

This led me to choose the Nokia E70, a more business style phone, but you could flip it open and reveal a keyboard. At the time I thought this was the best thing ever, but again practically it wasn’t ideal so was rarely used.

The E70 also saw a switch to Vodafone, they had the best singal in my area at the time.

I actually really liked this phone to begin with as no one else had it and it had the novelty factor, but that soon wore off.

The E70 was fairly short lived as the navigation joystick broke 2 or 3 times.

I eventually replaced it with my seventh phone the Nokia E65, my first slide to open phone. This was a great phone as well, no issues with it, served me well.

My next and final mobile phone in the Nokia era was probably the last popular phone before the official “smartphone” age.

Enter my eighth mobile phone the N95, or in my case the N95 8GB which came out 5 months after the N95 in August 2007, 2 months after the release of the first iPhone.

Everyone had this phone, it was really popular, good camera, music player, good usability and it looked cool. You would be sliding it open and closed all day long. It was a solid device.

You could even install an app called Rotate Me that automatically switched the device from portrait to landscape when you turned it on its side. It blew everyone’s mind, no one had seen anything like that before.

I stuck with the N95 until June 2009 where I queued outside the O2 store to get my hands on my first Apple Phone the iPhone 3GS. Since then there has been no looking back.

Enough nostalgia for now, I may continue my Apple Journey at a later date.

One final thing, i asked AI to genrate a picture of me in my wheelchair looking at my Nokia mobile phone, this is what it produced. I wish i was that good looking.