A history of my cell phones

Saturday, December 30. 2006

A history of my cell phones

We’re writing the year 1996. TV commercials start to add something like “www.companyname.com” at the bottom corners of the screen. Cell phones start to become popular. Some mates I met at the Austrian Federal Armed Forces used such things to phone with their girlfriends. As I didn’t have a girlfriend, I didn’t need a cell phone. It was the time when cell phones began to drop down from the managers to the rednecks, who carried them on their belts as if they were revolvers, always ready to draw.

It took me until October 1997 to receive my first one, due to opening a student’s account at a local bank. It was a Philips Fizz. I think I still have it somewhere at my parents, and it still should work, except for the display which has been broken by my brother. It was a cute thing. Philips seemed to have different designs which they didn’t distinguish. The antenna could be pulled out and the SIM-card had the size of a credit card.
As I only had a prepaid card at that time, calls became rather expensive. I’m not quite sure if everyone was worth it.

Anyway, new phone, new luck

— In September 1998 I switched from a prepaid card to a regular account with a phone number I still own today! Together with it I got the Motorola StarTAC 75, my first “toilet lid” cell phone. It worked quite well. 1998 was the heyday of Nokia-kiddies, and Motorola offered a counter-statement through its common ring tone and message sound. The battery was slim and weak, so I replaced it with a thicker one, which made it look humpy. However, I often dropped the cell until it got a crack such that the battery became loose. I fixed the lid with super-glue. The earpiece was rather silent, I had problems when using it outside. I think I still have the Motorola somewhere at my parents. By the way, in 1998 I wrote my first e-mail and had my first contact with Linux.

At the beginning of 2000 I got the Ericsson T18s, I think due to a “get your next cell phone” offer of my provider. It was still the time where only kiddies used Nokia. The Ericsson also had a toilet lid. It worked quite well, it was a bit heavy, though. It was my first dual band (900+1800MHz) cell phone, and it also supported voice dialling. It also was my first one which had a fixed antenna and a small-sized SIM-card. I think it was still working when it had been replaced by its successor, which I got as a present.

The Ericsson T28s was a present, at the end of 2000. That cell was really cool. It had a blueish illuminated display and the toilet lid could be snapped open by a button—the cell even had a snap-open counter whose value could be seen in the secret administration menu (which could be activated by the key-sequence right-*-left-left-*-left-*). The games were fabulous: Tetris and Solitaire! For Tetris you had to rotate the cell by 90°. No Nokia-kiddy had that. There also was a possibility to compose own ring tones, though not very sufficient. But it still had no infrared and no calendar. In the course of time I got problems with the mic, people began to hardly understand me.

2003, in due time before the Ericsson became unusable, I performed the paradigm shift at my first employer: The Nokia 6310i is still my corporate and private cell phone today. It is absolutely unbreakable! For me, that phone was an incredible milestone: infrared, Bluetooth, calendar, GPRS, WAP, Java. I could maintain it with Gnokii on Linux. I could exchange the operator logo with my own graphics (However, it only has a monochrome LCD). I could dialup to GPRS from my Linux-notebook via Bluetooth. I also use a Bluetooth headset. However, I couldn’t manage to synchronize contacts or the calendar with Linux apps, as the software relies on SyncML, what the phone doesn’t provide.
In 2006 I finally trashed both Ericssons.

2007 will again raise something new, as I’ll leave my first employer. I think I’m allowed to keep the 6310i as a backup phone. I’m already leering at my possible next cell phone, with which I’ll reactivate that phone number I got in September 1998. (That was always a thing that disturbed me when people get a new phone number once in a while.) I want to have the Nokia N73. As it’s a rather new model, it will cost me €199 even with a 2-year contract including that Vodafone stuff. It has everything: large color LCD, UMTS, 3 Megapixel camera, video call capability, video and MP3 player, FM radio, of course Bluetooth, infrared, finally SyncML, and—most wanted—a full-fledged e-mail client and an XHTML-browser. As it has the Symbian S60 operating system it also seems to be supported by Gnokii with the gnapplet driver. With that phone I won’t need something else for years again.

Posted by Stephan Paukner in Information Technology at 00:19 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (4)

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