The first smartphone I had was a Vodaphone Motorala V6 which had basic internet, camera with thirty seconds of video. I could play games on it but the screen was tiny and located at the top of the alpha-numeric keypad The next one I had was a 2nd hand PocketPC/mobile phone O2 XDA so I could only use it as a notepad, MP3 player (try getting spare headphones over the counter for the 2.55 [I think] headphone jack, camera (at the time the only graphics I could do were on MSPaint]. The first true smart phone I had was an Alcatel 903-OT which gad less memory and a small screen (try playing emulated games on it) than my HAUWEI (HTF d'you pronounce THAT?) Y300 which has more memory, better camera and bigger screen (I realised I'd bought the wrong model an hour later when I couldn't finf the front facing camera).
What about you lot?

Shit.

Fcking shit...

Thinking back to the XDA bricks, the SPV and even the original HTC Dream

Yup. Shit!!

My first one was an Orange SPV thing. Truly awful. Then an HTC Diamond which to be honest, i absolutely loved. Crashed like hell, but the design of it i loved.

I think the SPV must be in the running as one of the worst phones ever.

I had an HTC Tytn 2.
It had 3G and everything.
Shame Orange hadn't done any 3G down here at the time really!
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ty...33%3B413%3B328

You've got to admit the XDAs made superb note pads. My main problem was that the stylus/prickers got lost easily and were good for taking covert evidencei of bullying at the work place by activating the voice memo or 'innocently' passing by with the video camera recording (why didn't I think of it when I needed it?)

The Orange SPV is actually a HTC Canary re-badged. Also called Dopod 515, Qtek 6080.

That was my first Smartphone got it second hand with the detachable camera too!

http://www.smartphonehistory.com/specs.php?UID=3

I'm toying with the idea of letting you have a Tytn 2 unboxing video I've just done.
Not sure you want to hear my Westcountry accent though!

The keyboards@re unsuitable for my needs.

WAP, Series 60, directional keypads, Handango, predictive text....

Example specs from my 1st smartphone: 2.2" screen, 176x220 pixels, 16MB memory (expandable to 128 MB though!!), 0.3MP camera.

Maps, but no GPS.

Also about as thick as 3 iphone 6s...

Analogue phones were like a Wallis talkie, with a weaker antenna and worse battery life.
Digital phones at the start was 50 shades of Sh1t.
Then wap phones came about, they were worse than that. Nearly impossible to use and rather pointless.
The first 3G phones liked to munch on batteries and was like treacle they were so slow browsing, not just because of the network speed but the lack of thought out into phones about how user friendly they were ie anyone tried browsing on a Nokia N95 and it wasn't one of the first ones.

Anyone remember the first video calls haha. It was like a corrupted video file and that's as good as it got.

It wasn't until the touch screen / apple & Google got involved that phones started to think about user friendlyness.

My smartphone History

Orange SPV C500 First one I had a camera on was crap.
Nokia 6680
Nokia N73
Nokia N95
Nokia N97
Nokia N900
Samsung Galaxy S2
Samsung Galaxy S4
LG G3

I had a Tytn2 for a while. It was difficult to view it as anything other than a small laptop with an interface designed by an incompetent. I had a few Windows 6.n devices over the years. Interface was terrible, but an unnervingly capable operating system. Definitely not consumer focused - try connecting one to an external bluetooth GPS dongle, it was harking back to the old DOS days, setting up internal/external COM ports.

Symbian on the other hand, just paired up and worked.

Overall I still have a lot of time for the original Symbian handsets, and would love to find a 7650 and occasionally give it a go.

There were quite a few touchscreen devices before Apple and Google came along. Ericsson had the R380 World phone with touch back around 2000, which was the precursor to Symbian.

The (Sony) Ericsson P800 was 2002, so five years before the iPhone. A touchscreen UI (but resistive touchscreen) and many similarities to what we use today, but obviously with a far lower resolution and not the pinch/pull and other features made possible with a capacitive screen.

Nokia's take on Symbian with Series 60 (non-touch) was arguably more successful, but perhaps the wrong idea for the long-term. Nokia did of course eventually realise touch was important, and had dabbled with other devices and form factors, but it was perhaps too late.

Great as the N95 was (and it was incredibly popular, thanks mostly due to the great camera) the iPhone made it suddenly look rather antiquated, even though the iPhone 2G had a crap camera, obviously no 3G, no app store at first and loads of limitations that some existing smartphone users would have been rather annoyed about. Cut and paste, Bluetooth file transfer etc etc.

The launch of 3G was messed up by just about every network. Everyone figured video calling was the future, despite being just 64Kbps (why it was this slow, I have no idea given 3G was 384Kbps, which would have been far better if still not great) and seemed to concentrate on that over things like improving Internet services. And of course it wasn't for a bit longer than we got 3G smartphones, so the likes of the P800 were held back by pretty pathetic GPRS speeds.

Personally, if Sony Ericsson and Nokia hadn't messed up, UIQ hadn't effectively gone bust, and Symbian had worked harder to standardise as UI instead of letting companies do their own thing, we might have seen Symbian holding its own against Apple and keeping Android from ever happening. Heck, Google could have been buying Symbian instead.

(Did I post all of this without mentioning Windows Mobile? No, it wasn't a mistake. It was so bad, it doesn't deserve any mention!)

I don't know, it was the first 3G phone I had from T-Mobile, the MDA then upgraded to the MDA II (Tytn2) which had a tilting screen. Managed 1.8mbps that did back in 2005 on the new HSPA network I think O2 had them as the XDA, but of course the data speeds on O2 were crap back then too!

Outlook Mobile sync'd my mailbox well, and I could flag and unflag messages which changed on the desktop. The mini-USB charging port was a lot more robust than today's micro USB.

The OS wasn't bad, but needed a stylus, and like the other poster, linking to Bluetooth dongles was a nightmare of COM port rubbish - luckily the T-Mobile MDA and MDA II both had built in bluetooth

There were some good things on Windows Mobile. Not many. The UI was flawed, it was totally unintuitive, and the early devices with no NVRAM that lost all your data when the battery died (or you removed the battery) were laughable. I mean, seriously?!

Of course, for business users, they worked fairly well because of the apps developed for them specifically. For work, they probably did a fairly good job and certainly when Windows Phone came out, Windows Mobile remained available through devices from the likes of Motorola that slipped under the radar of consumers. Devices with integrated barcode readers, rugged designs, larger screens etc.

Windows Mobile did also seek to improve itself, and I remember going to a launch of V6 or V6.5 (or maybe earlier) where Microsoft proudly talked about custom ringtones and a thumbnail of the caller - and other thing that me, and others, were thinking 'erm, that's not a new feature'.

Of course, Apple would then reinvent loads of things with the iPhone so why be surprised?!

I don't know if you guys would be interested but it's worth knowing that the "Mobile Phone" has become the first product to reach 100%+ penetration in terms of subscriptions globally. That means that there is more than 1 SIM card to every single human being on the planet. Now obviously some people have multiple SIM cards hence why that number is inflated. When you look at the unique number of subscribers the total number is now over 4.6 billion and will shortly exceed 5 billion in the next few years. Do bear in mind that almost 30% of the population are technically two young to own their own mobile subscription so even unique users is pretty much 1:1.

Compare that to FM radio which has 4.2b users, ~3b internet users, ~2.6b bank account owners, ~2.1b TV sets, 1.6b PC/Laptops.

What's interesting is how fast mobile has taken off and just how connected we are now. Back when Computers were first put into use they were used for calculations mostly, now look at what computers are used for.

The same applies with mobile as well. Telegraph was invented as a form of wired communication and radio was invented as a form of wireless communication. Marconi, who is credited with demonstrating the first radio system said himself that radio could only be used for Ship to Land communication and that radio wouldn't be viable for other broadcasts. Yet here we are 100 years later with radio's in every single mobile device in order to communicate with each other.

Even when radio and telephone started to take off the bigger picture wasn't seen. Telephones weren't marketed as communication devices but as devices for rich people to own as an alarm service to the police or fire department in the case of an emergency.

In fact, even looking at SMS, people once again failed to see the big picture. SMS was invented as a way for operators to send SMS to users and not for users to send out to others. SMS was used to alert people about voicemails or other things. In fact some may remember here that the first GSM phones didn't support outgoing text messages but only incoming text messages. No one really saw the need for person to person communication and so text was just a one way thing.

It was Nokia who saw the opportunity and so in 1992 the first text was sent despite operators having been in business for almost a decade before. Operators didn't bother charging for SMS in the first place until it started taking off by itself and so charges had to be introduced.

Anyway, this all really goes to show just how much we don't know about the future until it actually happens.

Smartphones didn't look likely to take off but thanks to the internet and a mix of services, hardware and software we've seen smartphones now become the worlds most used device with the average user glancing at their smartphone around 150 times a day.

If I binned all the SIM cards I have (and most of them are active) then we might see that percentage fall to about 80%.

As it just so happens, I'm also a fan of Pocket PCs. They might be laughable technology now but some of the stuff I need needs shitloads of notes which'd need more than three loose leaf note pads (try keeping load of notes in order in those') so I find Pocket PCs perfect for my needs as I can make copies of the notes on SD card and back them up on hard drive. Until I get hold of a notepad app for my mobile that lets me keep my notes in order and can be stored on SD card and uses TXT format I'm sticking with Pocket PCs.

The only way I can get them direct. over the counter is by getting them from CEX (it's great to have spare ones) second hand.

The negatives:-
They DON'T/DIDN'T do wireless mobile internet
The styluses/prickers tended to get lost easily
You could only record video for a certain length of time on some models
A basic smart phone cost at least fifty quid but new Pocket PCs cost over a hundred quid a time

Writers can find them good tools for keeping notes in order and doing sequences on.

Blackberry 7230 anyone?

Still got one in my drawer. That colour screen is probably not far off what the new Pebble Time has!

Symbian was one of the most advanced Smartphone OS at the time, its sad that the industry ditched it. It was actually good when free of operator bloat, on most of the Nokias it was on, battery life was exceptional. The N8 though only 3G had a standby time for days, something modern smartphones can only dream of. I think what killed it was everyone bailing and moving to the dominant OS now. Its a shame it really is, early version were predictably piss poor. However from the N73 onwards it was great, god I remember getting that phone and thinking that screen was massive, later got the N95 8GB edition, the predecessor the standard N95 is what ushered in the smartphone era good and proper, I think it was the first phone to have a 5MPX camera widely available in the European market. It was massively popular, very well recieved by the tech industry and consumers at large. That was Nokia's last big hit, save the 6700 which wasn't a smartphone.

God to I miss those days when premium material handset were common place, not like it is now where some of the biggest manufacturers think flogging last years phone off as this years new flash in the pan will do.

It was a lot more exciting for me when I was reporting on new devices, as you never quite knew what you were going to get.

So many parameters that could be tweaked, different form factors etc.

Now there's not a lot of design influence on a new smartphone, and you pretty much know the current gen of chipsets so few surprises there either.

Okay this thread is just about smartphones, but if I open it wider to include all phones (including feature phones that could still run Java apps and games, and browse the net and offer tethering for mobile data to a laptop) then there was so much to get excited about - even the absolute dross. Maybe even more so the absolute dross.

I also wish Symbian hadn't messed up. I think we can safely blame Nokia for that, and they started long before their troubles and the arrival of Elop. Having helped annoy so many other S60 licensees saw Panasonic, LG, Samsung and others stop producing Symbian devices - and would have given all of them more incentive to look elsewhere.

Samsung made some incredible smartphones. The I8510 was probably a lot better than the N95/N95 8GB, and the I8910 was better yet - with a capacitive screen too!

I think a lot of people may do a Nokia a disservice in respect of how they moved the market forward. Sony Ericsson had a lot to do with it as well, K800i was arguably one of the best camera phones around at the time, xenon flash etc. Some of the best phones of the last 15 years aren't even smartphones and I feel we have lost something in the transition some where.

I don't think Nokia was just to blame for Symbian's failings, I think a lot of it was down to ineptness from other Symbian device makers and not seeing the the game changing Apple device.

Now the i8910 That was a fabulous phone, when it got released on Orange it was infested with bloat and crapware. I would always recommend to customers to uninstall it and point them in a direction to debrand it if you will. Was the first phone to record and display 720p video as well, the phone was well supported by a determined user. Battery life, sound, fluidity improved massively for those that installed the custom rom. I suppose this like XDA was the forebearer to the Android Custom Roms that are so common place today. A 3.7 inch screen by the standards at the time was massive, now its considered compact, I do think some common sense has disappeared in light of the ever expanding size of smartphones today.