I been thinking about older phones recently. This is mostly because I am trying to find a new phone, yet all the phones available here are pretty much locked down garbage that don’t even have any sort of headphone jack or SD card slots. I kinda remember how back in the day, smartphones were cooler. We had a variety of choices. We had removable batteries. We also had headphone jacks and SD card slots. We used to have all this, and yet we had all this taken away. This didn’t happen overnight, but it was a slow and mediated process, fueled by corporate greed, and these companies realizing they can charge far more for extra storage, instead of keeping the SD card slot. The headphone jack suffered a similar fate.
A lot of the phones listed here are phones that either my parents owned for a while and I managed to get my hands on it for a while, or are phones that I owned and tinkered with across the years. A lot of details are kinda hazy, since a lot of this is from my own memory, but I tried recounting the experience I had with these phones and what past Lug thought about them back in the day.
Blackberry Storm
My dad used to own a Blackberry Storm back in 2010-11 and I remember thinking it was the coolest thing ever. It had features I remember thinking were the coolest thing ever, and it had games! I could also customize the way the font looked, and kid me thought that was the coolest thing ever. Also the screen was clickable, and I thought it was pretty cool too.
That phone would eventually die due to a cracked screen, and it turns out that the clickable screen just straight out dies if you manage to damage the screen in any way. The capacitive touch still worked, but that clicking thing? Not so much. In hindsight that clickable screen was a stupid design, and I wish Blackberry just could’ve kept to the capacitive screen they were already using.
I kinda wish that Blackberry lasted a bit longer. The few Android phones they managed to make were pretty cool all things considered, and if they managed to make a phone that looked like a Blackberry Curve, but running Android today, I think that would probably be really awesome and may actually sell quite a lot nowadays.
Nokia Lumia 920
I think the year was 2013 or so, when my dad decided to buy a used Nokia Lumia 920. I remember that the color of that phone was black, and that screen was raised all so slightly. I think the highlight of this phone was always Windows Phone: back then it was a breath of fresh air compared to the stale design of Gingerbread. Live Tiles were a feature that I really really liked to be honest. It made the homescreen feel alive compared to the static boredom of modern Android or iOS. It is kinda surprising how decent Windows Phone looked like The UI design in Windows Phone was really uniform and nice with nothing looking out of place.
There was an Xbox app on that phone, and you can play some games there too. The game had a demo for some third person shooter, which I barely remember the name of. In that game you played as some sort of secret agent, there was a big ass ship in the beginning area, and further down the game, you had yourself a very tall staircase that you had to descend. I cannot remember the name of the game at all, lmao.
Anyways I had this phone for a couple days and I used it as my personal phone for that time. I still miss that phone, and I wish that Windows Phone didn’t die like how it did, but lets be real, if it survived for long enough, it would’ve become the same bloated mess as modern Windows is now lmao.
On an unrelated note, after using that phone for that little bit, I wanted a phone with Windows Phone so bad. I remember finding a Lanix Ilium W250, a budget phone from 2015 that had Windows Phone 8 on it, but I never bought it since I was a broke teenager at the time. In hindsight, Windows Phone was already stumbling to its death during this time, the platform was missing so many apps and by the time Android reached to Marshmallow, it was pretty much over.
M4 Style
The M4 Style SS4045 (will be calling it the M4) is a budget smartphone from 2014-2015 sold only in the country I live in. I eventually got my hands on one back in 2016, I needed a phone after I broke the screen on that S3 mini earlier, and this was the phone I could get.
I remember it had a unique skin on top of KitKat, the OS it ran. The UI was mostly colored white, with a couple of purple accents here and there. The phone had a cover case that displayed the time when it was closed, and the back was made out of this kinda cloth/fake leather that felt pretty good in the hand, and it came with a display cover that when it covered the display, it makes the screen display a clock though the cover window. That display cover was attached to the back cover however, and it eventually tore off. Oh well.
Usually this phone would be unremarkable trash, since it had barely 4GB of internal storage, had a pathetic Mediatek SoC (the MT6582M) and was stuck on Android Kitkat, meanwhile other phones were starting to get Android Lollipop by that time. However there was something special about it: I found that this phone had a small community of people willing to mod the shit out of this phone, and I eventually got Marshmallow running on this thing with an unofficial build of Cyanogenmod. There was this very gleeful feeling with using this phone with Marshmallow, since it was never ever intended to run anything above KitKat ever. But despite that, it ran perfectly for the most part, and I used the hell out of that thing. Of course the battery hated that, and it would cause the phone to drain really quickly, but honestly? Who gave a shit? I was running Android 6 on a phone that was intended to only run Android 4.4! And teen me thought that was the coolest thing ever. Honestly I do kinda miss that feeling.
HTC 10
I never had a phone that I miss as much as the HTC 10. This phone was first released back in 2016 and was probably the best looking phone I ever seen. It had a uni-shell aluminum back and it was the most premium feeling phone I ever owned. I bought it used during 2018 since it was the only phone that I could afford that still had bootloader unlocking. The purchase went well, but I realized that the battery was pretty much shot. Fuck it, we ball™.
When I got back, I was very dismayed at the fact this phone was a Verizon phone with Verizon apps already installed and they took so much space. When I saw those apps, I realized something terrible: Verizon enforces bootloader locking on all the phones they sell, and there is generally no way to get them unlocked. However, for this phone (and HTC phones of this era in general) there was a way to get it unlocked, but it required paying for an program which may or may not work. I decided to just accept defeat, and I tried updating the phone to Android 8 just so at least I can get a more recent version of Android (the phone was stuck at the earliest version of Android it could run, it being Android 6). Unfortunately, it gave me an error.
No mattered how hard I tried, the updater would just fail and nothing would ever happen. I decided to just wipe the phone, just to see if something would change. I booted up to the recovery and well I was met with a custom recovery already installed, TWRP. This meant that not only the bootloader was already unlocked by the past owner, but it already had a custom recovery. I am not sure how they managed to restore the stock OS without touching the bootloader, or if they installed the custom recovery afterwards, but either way? I was glad. Whomever it was, I thank you so much.
This meant I can skip the dumb process of paying for software and allowed me to get right away onto installing the latest version of Pixel Experience (back then, it was either Android 9 or 10). I eventually replaced the battery (I paid someone to do it. Go see JerryRigEverything’s teardown video on why I didn’t do it myself LMAO) and things finally got back up and running. I used that phone for a while, until it decided to hard brick itself. a couple years later. And that was that. It was pretty unfortunate.
After this happened, I was out of a phone and needed one fast. I eventually got a cheapo iPhone SE, a pretty decent little phone that I actually kinda liked using for the most part. And after that phone, I went back to Android by getting the OnePlus Nord N10, a shitty phone that I still own to this day.
final thoughts
I truly believe that 2016 was the last year where the smartphone was still interesting and fun. We still had so much variety that you can pick and choose if you wanted features or just wanted a sick looking phone. There were also a lot of overall good phones like the Samsung Galaxy S7 and the HTC 10. These phones had character compared to the soulless slabs of glass we carry around nowadays. And that is kinda sad isn’t it.
I think the biggest loss we have ever seen when it comes to smartphones was the headphone jack. In classic modern fashion, we decided to replace that dependable port with a horrible wireless standard that loves to drop out, stop working, and just generally be undependable at all times. There was no reason to kill off the headphone jack. The space it took up was negligible and if you really that desperate for more space, just make the phone thicker? Does anyone even give a shit about thin phones anyways? I really doubt it.
