When did you get your first mobile phone?
This was discussed today at work, when did you get your first mobile?
I bought mine from Woolworths back in summer 1999, it was Vodafone branded pre-paid model for £70.
It came with a £5 topup voucher, you had to use that in 7 days, after the time was up, you had to buy another voucher, even if there was still money left on it! Very odd.
All it could do was make/recieve calls and text, nothing else.
I've actually been a Vodafone pre-paid customer ever since, apart from a spell i had with BT Cellnet in the early 2000's.
I bought mine from Woolworths back in summer 1999, it was Vodafone branded pre-paid model for £70.
It came with a £5 topup voucher, you had to use that in 7 days, after the time was up, you had to buy another voucher, even if there was still money left on it! Very odd.
All it could do was make/recieve calls and text, nothing else.
I've actually been a Vodafone pre-paid customer ever since, apart from a spell i had with BT Cellnet in the early 2000's.
The trouble with tribbles is.......
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I use it more to take photos of items that need to be researched.
It's a Nokia 6300 and it is still going strong and has managed to outlast many iphone 4/5/6/7 that friends have spent thousands on that seem to fall apart and fail at the slightest bit of moisture or when a feather is dropped on them.
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I am afraid of it making me sterile and at the age of 80, that would be a tragedy.
I am still in the mode of Spectrum computers, so I know Jack S**t, and where he lives.
I am to busy living life one day at a time to bother learning how to make a mobile call, I have never texted, taken a selfie ( the last photo of me was in 1978 ) or even learned to use a computer properly. If it were not for Mel the Bell I would not even have a Dropbox. That was only a few weeks ago for the Gargoyle images. That has taken me 30 odd years to get it out there. He is a bad influence, avoid at all costs, he is in to all that Demonic Punk Rock music **** and all as well, he is the Anti - Pasty or something, he comes from a place in the North as well, burn him he is a witch !
Allegedly of course !
Mat I have your number, it is 01-01-212 ( Punk Joke )
:))
I traded that up to a Nokia Vodafone pay-as-you-go when the place I was working at was chucking out old rep phones and asked if I wanted one. (Had to get a Vodafone SIM as it was on that network)
I kept the Motorola one, but it stopped working at some point, which makes me think it might have been knocked off, (had a few suspicions about the mate who gave it to me) and I had stopped using the number when I got the Vodafone anyway.
I've had quite a few since then, but I've still never bothered to get locked into a contract - always get pay-as-you-go. I still have a landline (easiest/cheapest way to call my folks in the UK) and I don't usually spend more than a couple of minutes at a time talking on my mobile.
I have a contract phone for work (all paid for by them) and it's OK being able to use Data when I'm out and about, but my ISP provides free Wi-Fi hotspots to its users all over town, so it's not like it's that special
(certainly not enough to get locked into a contract for two years where I'd have to pay a minimum of $50 per month.
I currently spend just under $30 on minutes for my phone every two months, and since I've had the work mobile I've hardly used any of my own minutes - I just have to top up within the time limit and I keep the balance, so it's actually quite large at the moment).
I mainly just use my own phone on weekends and holidays now (and for Facebook and this place as I don't want to use those on a company phone), mainly because I don't want to be reachable by work when I'm not there.
http://www.mobile88.com/gen/prodspics/sagemrc815_front.jpg
My next phone after that was a Nokia 7110 and that got me a good way though uni. I liked that it had a 14kbps modem built in so I could check my email from my dorm room.
http://www.bsp.ru/TECH/NOKIA/noki7110.jpg
I've still got the Nokia, but I do not remember what happened to the Sagem. I wonder what happens to all the way old mobile phones/ Do you remember them old silly leather cases, so that people could wear their phones where everyone could see it.
http://thumbs.picclick.com/00/s/MTYwMFgxMjAw/z/3JkAAOSwIgNXnnnY/$/old-sagem-mobile-phone-_1.jpg
I do also remember wankers in the pub comparing ring tones and thinking it was cool.
I also had one of those silly leather cases, but it's something that I trying to forget! ;)
Its going to be a lot of use in an emergency then! :))
I then progressed through a few work phones, none of which I can remember. When I left that place I purchased my first phone which actually had a colour screen! It was some Blackberry that I thought was wonderful but was in actual fact, crap! It had some rudimentary internet connection that was about 0.01K per second.
Around 2012 I finally upgraded to a smart phone - iPhone 4S - and it was like a glimpse into the future compared to what I'd been using before. Apple then ruined it with each subsequent update to iOS that eventually slowed it to a crawl and stopped many apps working. Typically said apps required a more recent phone to install.
I got through two of those phones, the first one had to go back to Apple as the Wifi suddenly stopped working after an update. Well, it did work but I had to put it in a water-tight bag and, I **** you not, place it in the freezer for an hour. It would then get wi-fi for half an hour. Took it back to the Apple store in Birmingham, which was what can only be decscribed as organised chaos. Changed it for me on the spot though.
Last December, after eventually having enough of crap iOS updates, I upgraded to my first Android phone - a Vodafone Smart Ultra 6 - which has to be the best budget smart phone on the market. It's feature set is as good as any £300+ Android phone. It trounces the iPhone in every way.
I'll never forget being in the pub once, around 1993/4, which back then if you remember, anyone who owned a mobile phone was as you said, a wanker. This lad walked in chatting as loud as he could into his mobile, making sure everyone was looking at him, when it suddenly started ringing :-) Never seen anyone leave a pub so quickly...
http://gsmversus.com/images/big/phone_philips-diga_big.jpg
Did the job well enough. I had a pager before that, which was awful. No text, it would just give you the number of the person who'd called you. Quite handy in a way though - if it was someone I didn't feel like speaking to, I'd just tell them I couldn't find a payphone. :D
Green-mono screen.
Did the job of calls and texts on pay as you go. I think it was on Vodafone and I usually spent £15.00 - £20.00 per month on it. I'm sure the bigger top-ups you put on it the extra free time you were given.
Ahh, how I remember that time (positively) - that was back when you could have a face-to-face conversation with people and not being annoying they're checking their effin' Facebook account or whatnot. :-/
My games for the Spectrum: Dingo, The Speccies, The Speccies 2, Vallation, SQIJ.
Twitter: Sokurah
Ted Hughes wrote a poem "Do Not Pick Up The Telephone" around 1980 after he'd received some bad news by phone. It's actually quite chilling to read now, bearing in mind social media etc.
http://klab.lv/community/t_dzeja/67316.html
At that time there were the usual urban myths about how you could get stolen electrical stuff to work, such as car radios etc. One of those urban myths was to but said electrical item in a freezer for 24hrs!! I took the phone home, put in the my moms freezer for 24hrs and, you know what? Feck all happened!!! You could still turn it on and make emergency calls, but, that was it.
My first mobile was back in 1995/6 was a Nokia 6160 I think, but, the best phone I ever had was one of these ruggedised gems. You could drop it on the floor, the battery lasted for days and days and it just worked:
I got one of those (or one very like it) in 1996. I'd started seeing Mrs Ant and she lived a good bit away. BT wanted £200 up front to put in a phone line to my flat, so I went to Dixons, paid a tenner and walked out with one of those on a contract. Cost me about £60 a month in calls iiirc. Worth it just to give BT the finger for their outrageous charges.
And the year was 2003. I remember it exactly as it was also the year when I met my wife and being able to talk to her was maybe the main reason why I capitulated to mobile phones ;)
Actually in first days of mobile phones I was quite negative about them. I believed they were used mainly by some yuppies, posh annoying guys or gangsters.
And I also have seen them as some means of control taking away your freedom. You know, you are in early 20s, you have gone partying and suddenly your mum calls you and investigates what you are doing. Or people from work call you to ask something work related when you are on holidays.
And it was also annoying when you meet with somebody and half of the meeting he is playing with his phone. Actually it is annoying as hell still today.
When I'm on the train there is a sea of heads all facing down as everyone is on their phone/device. If a troupe of naked girls was dancing in a field as the train passed, no one would probably notice! :))
Sometimes I switch my phone off when I go out, but feel guilty as I need it as my mum is in poor health and there might be an emergency. Sometimes it's nice to be 'off the grid'.
Whoops !
I walk between my sites, and I'm guilty of walking down the street typing things up. It's the only way I can fit everything into my day, though - otherwise I just have to type it up on the computer when I get back to the office.
I hate the ticketing program they use - as does everyone else who uses it - except the devs who program it and tell us about the 'great new updates' that they've added in an email - after they've implemented them of course - that invariably break another part of the program that used to work.
I especially hate the crappy version that runs on our phones and randomly closes the window, losing everything you've typed, or - if you're in a cell deadspot when you hit 'send' - loses everything you typed into limbo and you can't recover it.
Oh yes, and it randomly skips to the next record and if you're unlucky, you only realize once you've submitted what you've typed on the wrong ticket. And you can't redact anything you've submitted. And you can't copy and paste from it unless you're on the computer version of the program, so you have to go back to the right record and type it all out again.
I've tried bringing this crap up at meetings and the head dev just admits that it's a known issue and then tries to deflect from it by using a straw man on whomever brought it up and inferring that they're too stupid to know how to use it properly or too dumb to use a workaround. (Even though all we do is use workarounds) and then all the office bods have a little giggle (because they all work in the office every day and have each other's backs) and all the field guys who know exactly what whoever mentioned it is talking about stay quiet because they don't want the same treatment.
(Bit of a tangent, but nice to get that out..)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22013228
Slightly off topic but related. When the first mobiles came out a techy friend of mine told me that as these early jobbies were analogue it was possible to pick up conversations on a transistor radio by taking the back off the radio and touching the windings on the ferrite cored aerial with a screwdriver.
After some prodding and poking and finding the sweet spot on the aerial I did get this to work though have no idea how, I can only assume shorting out the aerial windings made it sympathetic to the phone frequency.
It sounds like a really sh*t app that you have to use. I'm not a mobile developer but it sounds like it doesn't do the basics correctly.
That was my first as well. 1999, somehow me and the mrs had one each free from barclaycard. 50p a minute calls, but cheaper to ring each other, which was about par for then. It had a full size SIM card, not what is now known as full size sim, but one the same size as a credit card.
I do have a Samsung Young 2..and it's totally beyond a joke. Worst piece of crap I ever paid £7.50 a month for. I only use it very rarely..never for wandering around a supermarket enquiring of one's partner if we need beans or not. You see, I only wanted a cellphone..not a toy. Personally, I like all communication in writing via mail or email. TBH..cellphones would be in my room 101.