Earlier this month, we celebrated the 50-year anniversary of the first-ever mobile phone call. So we thought we’d take a trip down memory lane and remember the first phones we had – it was a nostalgia-sized hit of dopamine, so we wanted to share with you our firsts.
A little bit of history, though. On April 3, 1973, a man named Martin Cooper was walking through the streets of Manhattan carrying something no one had ever seen before: a mobile phone. As he strolled, he made a call, and he made history. The first text wasn’t sent for a really long time afterwards. It was sent on December 3, 1992. On the UK’s Vodafone network, engineer Neil Papworth sent the first text: ‘Merry Christmas’. A year later, Nokia introduced the first phone with texting capability.
It wasn’t until about a decade later that anyone from the Gizmodo Australia team had a mobile phone. Here’s a look at our first phones and what we remember about them.
Nokia 3310
“I think I had a Nokia 3310? I loved the squishiness of the buttons and playing Snake on it for hours on end. I also loved that it would have survived a nuclear blast – so every time my clumsy self dropped it on the floor, it came out unscathed. Oh, and the battery would last like 35 years, so I never had to charge that thing,” – Steph.
LG KP202 flip-phone
“Mine was one of these LG flip phones and I thought it was so cool because it had a screen on the front and on the inside,” – Lauren.
Nokia 3315
“Nokia 3315. Early 2000s styling married to the 3310’s inherent indestructibility. My sister, more musically talented than I, would use its built-in ringtone creator to reverse engineer popular songs and we would sell them for $5 a pop,” – David.
and
“A red Nokia 3315 that my parents got me at the end of primary school, because my highschool wasn’t local anymore. I have an extremely Early 2000s memory of making a custom ringtone of Alien Ant Farm’s ‘Smooth Criminal’ with my friend, while we were watching cartoons on Newgrounds,” – Chris.
Apple iPhone 4S
“My first phone was technically a Nokia brick (forgot the exact model), but the first phone that I cared about enough to genuinely look after was the iPhone 4S when I was 13 (the first to come with Siri). My dad was out of work at the time, and it cost him an arm and a leg to get this for me, but I’ll forever appreciate it. Because it was an iPhone, it doubled as a gaming device, which my dad knew I’d care about, but it also gave him confidence that I could be reached at any time. He also pranked me at Christmas by filling the box with M&Ms under the Christmas tree,” – Zac.
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Motorola V2288
“I got this bad boy in like 2003 as my first ‘to and from school’ phone. My mum just said I got super mad at her for not getting me a Nokia but I secretly liked that I could change the skins, but mostly I loved that I was the first kid in my class to have a mobile phone,” – Asha.
Nokia 3210
“I used to take it to school and it was so heavy that it used to pull my shorts down unless I did my belt up an extra notch. The vibration was insanely strong to the point where you could hear it buzz from the other end of the house if it was on a hard surface. It had Snake and the ability to program your own ringtones, so to my 14-year-old dumbass brain, it was the height of cool. I used to spend whole afternoons looking up Metallica ringtones and carefully punching in the digits so my phone would play a monophonic version of Master of Puppets when mum called me to say she was out the front at the end of the school day. Also, you could throw that shit at the wall and it would just fall into 3 different indestructible pieces that just fit back together and turned on like nothing ever happened,” – Matt
Nokia 8210 (we think)
“When I was nine, I was given my brother’s Nokia 8210 (?), ye olde Nokia Brick. At the time I loved it since all I wanted to do was play Snake and Space Invaders non-stop. But I also got a kick out of designing my own wallpapers with the Sketch feature. I vividly remember designing a checkerboard as well as a sunset over the ocean and being very proud of myself. Unfortunately, I was never allowed more than $10 of credit a month, so I would often use it all in about 15mins texting the one other friend my age that was allowed a phone. Good times,” – Bella.
Nokia Lumia 1020
Nokia 6121
And lastly, our queen of incredible artwork, Ruby, pays tribute to her first phone.