Android is my favorite currently, but when I was growing up it was Symbian, comparing it to java it was miles ahead with way more advanced capabilities!
Damn this makes me feel old. I’m from before phones had OS.
hahaha
Windows Phone in the 7/8 era. It felt well composed, all it’s features worked pretty well, and it was fluid and smooth.
Did it have a lot of features? No, but what it had it did well. Once the concept of apps took off hard, it was clear WP wouldn’t get the popular ones, and with Microsoft beefing with Google at the time, the OS lost all its support and died.
damn i am jealous now that i never experienced a windows phone growing up!
rotary
@schizanon same :)
nice!
our first phone was rotary!
Maemo and Windows Phone Metro.
oh wow i have never heard of maemo, sounds really interesting i will check it out!
There’s a modern-ish fork of it for PinePhone. I haven’t yet tried it, but I intend to!
My first was Symbian but my favourite will always be Windows phone. I still run square home launcher to get that familiar tile screen on my pixel 6 pro
aww that is cute hahaha
Palm OS, hands down.
never heard of it, very interesting!
They had some really impressive devices in the early 2000s. You had to dock it to your PC and sync all your stuff to it, kinda like an iPod but for emails and documents. Some of them even supported external keyboards!
oh wow this seems so cool!
Growing up? Oh no I’m old!
hahaha
I really loved what windows phone was doing before they did the windows 10 merge thing. Just a really nicely constructed UI
Never had a windows phone, always wanted one. did it feel like pc windows or it was its own thing?
same here, a windows phone was my first smartphone and to this day I love that UI more than almost anything else since then
So, I’m going to choose “growing up” to mean “late teenage years” because while mobiles technically existed before then I didn’t know or care what they were.
First phone was a Phillips Savvy. I got it because it was cheap but SMS were 20c each and I didn’t really have a job, so I mostly just called people or messaged people and asked them to call me.
Then I got a second-hand Nokia 5110 which was more expensive but really common. You could buy new plastic fronts/back and swap between them. Great phone but it died when I accidentally broke the screen.
Ok, so the first phone that I loved (even though I didn’t like the design) was an Ericsson A3618 because, even though it was still monophonic, it had a ringtone composer built into it. So I’d sit there making my own weird ringtones… and it had Tetris. So I guess that’s the answer.
The last phone I remember having before getting a Blackberry at work (and by definition far from “growing up”) was a Siemens C55. Polyphonic ringtones, prince of persia… it was pretty cool.
oh wow what a history! i remember my first phone only had one line so to text you had to wait for the screen to slowly scroll, t is so funny now but back then it was revolutionary!
Growing up, it was Windows Phone. That was the first time I remember being able to install user-created apps on a phone. I spent so much time playing old SNES games on an emulator on my T-Mobile Dash when I was in high school.
so jealous…
Don’t hate on me, but I was a big fan of windows fan… I still can’t get anything to come close to replacing the friends hub that allowed you to see contacts friends feeds in one app.
that sounds so cool!
Windows phone was pretty cool. I never had one but they seemed fast and intuitive. I really liked that there was a 3rd major player - Android, iOS, Windows Phone. BlackBerry was still around but not really in the game anymore, and switched to Android anyway.
One of my friends still has an old Nokia Windows Phone and uses it as an MP3 player, claiming there’s never been quite as perfect of a phone since.
I’ve always been an android person, starting with cyanogenmod back in the day and now lineage, as well as plenty of xda forum unofficial aosp/cyanogen/lineage builds when I had phones that didn’t have great official support. I dabbled with pureos and postmarketos but the app ecosystem is still developing for mobile linux and things like hibernation, modem sleep, and screen off notifications are a bit rocky.
Hopefully someday I’ll be able to use an OS on my phone where I’m not blocked from apps because “we detected you’re rooted even though you’re not, no healthcare app for you” or “no contactless payment unless you’re on a stock rom”
it is so sad :/
…and this is the moment I realize I’m old
(edit) and of course I had to figure it out anyways. gotta love wikipedia. probably this one: standard domestic phone 1950-1984 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_500_telephone I remember dialing it actually hurt my finger.
My phone OS was a landline, with the only app being a rotary dial.
that was our first too!
hahaha that is really funny! i remember it being our first phone and it was so slow to use a number and wait. its funny to me now though
Landline
Mine was a party line because we lived out in the country. I had to listen real careful for clicking sounds cause our neighbors could pickup and listen to our conversations.
@schizanon that’s unsettling!
oof…
it was fun when we had internet on hahaha
Palm OS was ahead of its time as well. It’s a shame that they couldn’t adapt fast enough to keep their relevance.
Though I grew up in the age of feature phones. The Razor was all the rage. Man, it was so thin.
i am so surprised i have never heard of it, but i keep seeing it in this thread
Webos was so far ahead of it’s time. It took years of android porting many of it’s features over. Now it just lives on TV’s.
It’s hard to comprehend how far ahead the palm pre and webos was. Sprint wasn’t even selling android phones yet. But webos had cards, advanced account integrations, full browser and a beautiful interface
