Do you remember your history of smartphones?

Several Blackberries... several iPhones... several Androids... might go back to the iPhone in 2023.
 
Nokia 6682 (New with Cingular)
iPhone 3GS (New with AT&T)
iPhone 4 (Wife's old phone when she upgraded)
Samsung Galaxy S3 (Wife's old phone when she upgraded)
Samsung Galaxy S5 (Wife's old phone when she upgraded)
Samsung Galaxy S7 (Wife's old phone when she upgraded)

I keep looking for a new phone to replace it, but there don't seem to be any flagship phones with a headphone jack and a physical home button anymore.
 
Motorola Droid 1 - loved this phone. My introduction to rooting, custom ROMs, even over-and underclocking. Held onto this one for as long as possible before it
Motorola Droid Bionic - 4G! Dual-core! 1GB RAM! Crappy battery life!
Moto X - Loved the design and the software. Got buggy pretty quickly, though. Battery life was pretty meh, too.
Motorola Droid Turbo 2 - Gigantic battery. Gigantic bezels. Decent camera for the time. Had to get it replaced twice. First one developed a large green stripe down one side of the screen. Second one, camera died. Traded the third one in before it developed any problems.
Google Pixel - Loved the fingerprint reader. And the camera was a revelation at the time. It made me think I could go on vacation without my old DSLR.
Google Pixel 4 - OG Pixel hard-bricked itself, so I got this to replace it. Face unlock was neat, but no fingerprint reader. Sad. Also, not so good battery life.
Google Pixel 6 - Current phone. Love it. No issues with it, so I guess I got lucky. Came with a free pair of Google Buds A (that I don't use now).
 
All AT&T

Lumia 900 (Blue)
Lumia 1020 (Fun-kay bright yellow)
Lumia 1520 (Black)
Lumia 950XL (White)
and then AT&T literally gave me for free a Samsung Galaxy Note 9 to Please, Mr. Miller... get off of Windows Phone...

and I am still on that Galaxy Note 9. The hardware is fine, but I hate the software on this thing so much. It's counterintuitive to use, you need an app to do anything other than answer a phone call, and I've had to download an app and program it to monitor phone sensors so I can get a feature that was built-in to my Windows phone (when the phone moves away from my head, auto-switch to speakerphone, and when it goes back, auto-switch back). Frankly, every Android phone I have ever touched just feels janky to use and iPhone isn't really any better.

Windows Phone may not have had a lot of "good apps" but it didn't really need apps. I'd sign in with my existing MS account and just worked with everything I needed right there on the home screen, complete with live updates. It felt like greased lightning to use in a way that no phone I have ever touched since has. Windows Phone 8.1 was definitely peak Windows Phone - Windows Phone 10 never really got 100% completed.

In my opinion, Microsoft prematurely axed the Windows Phone right when the phone OS was really starting to come into it's own. It might not have been kicking ass in the US, but it had it's fans here. In other countries, like India, they were a significant part of the market. But if we are going to point out MS strategic errors, no upgrade path for the Lumia 900 was probably the biggest. You only get to nuke your entire existing ecosystem once if you want to survive and they did that with the releases of both both Windows Phone 7 and 8 and that whole situation really ruined MS's rep as a phone OS vendor.
 
Last edited:
mvmiller12 said:
Windows Phone may not have had a lot of "good apps" but it didn't really need apps.
Click to expand...
I held on to WP from 2010 to 2018. What finally pushed me to Android was Work requiring 2FA apps that weren't available on WP. Duo Mobile dropped WP in 2019- and barely updated the app the last year I was using it. We stopped writing service catalog KB articles for WP users long before that.

I still miss the tile interface. But I didn't miss the apps I never could use because it was WP. In hindsight, I'm stunned the platform lasted as long as it did.
 
BB Curve :) - > BB Bold (think I had two versions circa 2009-10) -> Infuse 4G/Iphone 4s (iphone was work mandated) -> Iphone 5 -> Moto X 2015 -> Nexus 6p - > S7 -> S8+ -> Note 9 -> Note 10 Plus -> S20+ -> Pixel 6P -> S22U incoming. This does not include the dozens I bought for family, the Samsung Insights program was really good while it lasted, multiple free or near free flagship phones.
 
Motorola DPC 650
Nokia 232
Nokia 6120
Samsung SGH A800
LG Black Safira
Samsung E330
Nokia 7110
Iphone 1, 2, 3 and 4s
Samsung s7, s10+, s20+
Samsung S22+ now
 
  1. Blackberry 8330
  2. Nexus S
  3. Nexus 5
  4. Nexus 6
  5. LG V35
  6. Samsung S22+

I tend to keep a phone until something goes wrong. The headphone jack on my V35 had a mechanical failure. The wifi radio in the Nexus 5 died. All the Android phones had terrible performance degradation over time (good for the first couple years then blehhh). Maybe the NAND doesn't hold up over time? I'm not willing to invest time in learning to do profiling on the Android platform so I just get a new phone.

The V35 was easily my favorite of the list. Perfect size, Fi compatible, expandable storage, headphone jack, etc. The only hardware incentive to upgrade is the improvement in camera tech in phones.
 
I keep phones for a long time, so here’s them all, smart or not:

Uniden CP4600 (mid ‘90s)
Uniden PCD2000 (late ‘90s)
A few Nokia candy bar phones. Don’t remember the models but what everyone had back then
Motorola Razr v3
Can’t remember what came between here
iPhone 3G
Motorola Atrix
Galaxy S4
Galaxy S8+
iPhone 14 Pro Max (last week)

Went almost a decade with the S4 and S8+. About 5 years apiece. Crazy!
 
Personal
Ericsson something (1998-1999, dumb) Fell off a planetarium.
Nokia 6162 (1999-2005, AT&T, basically a 5000 series with a flip keyboard cover)
Palm Treo something (~2005-2012)
Some cheap piece of crap I bought as a personal phone after going back to work after grad school and getting a work-issued iPhone. (2012-2014)
Google Nexus 5 (2014-2017, Motorola) Boot loop. Dead.
Moto Razr something, Google Fi phone with Android One (2017-2019) Quit charging. Not sure if it was phone hardware or battery, but it was a cheap and a couple years old so I just got a new phone.
Google Pixel 3a XL (2019-10/25/2022) Still had better battery life after 3 years than the Pixel 7 that replaced it, but it was EOL so no more security patches. Damned good phone.
Google Pixel 7 (10/25/2022-present)

Work
iPhone 4S (2012-2014, work issued)
**Google Nexus 6P (2016-2021, Huawei) Only really a work phone from 2016-2019. I changed positions and quit getting calls from customers, so it just sat there until the battery blimped out.
**Moto G Play (2021-2022) Sort of a work phone, went cheap since I wasn't really using it. Canceled the service when the battery blimped out from being plugged in for ~1.5 years. Still powered up long enough to do a factory reset.

I'm 50/50 on phones not making it to retirement. 5 out of 10 not counting the shiny new Pixel 7 I got 3 days ago. Only one I've ever broken was the first phone I ever had. It popped off it's belt clip while I was climbing down a ladder on the roof of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and fell 20' or so onto gravel. That broke the screen but it could still make and receive calls. Had to manually dial the number though since I couldn't see the stored numbers without the screen. Other than that I've never used a case and never cracked a screen on a smartphone. Yeah I busted a dumb phone screen, but that doesn't count as busting a smartphone. At this point I think I'm going to keep skipping the case until I break more than one. If that 1998 brick had fit in my pocket like a modern smartphone it wouldn't have fallen.
 
Samsung S... I think it was the second or third gen..
Nexus 4
Moto X
OnePlus 3
OnePlus 6
OnePlus 8
Pixel 6
Pixel 7
 
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