Anyone else remember then being the cool new thing instead of a mandatory one?
Find yourself a privacy comm and settle in. You have agency over you digital life.
Hopefully, I will someday be able to buy a Linux smartphone that is truly controlled by me.
You can’t exist without a smart phone now. I went to a baseball game and refused to install their app for the ticket (which couldn’t be purchased with cash). They said they can text a link to a QR code. Printing it wasn’t an option.
I should have asked what I could do if I didn’t have a phone but I suspect their head would explode.
At Costco, you can’t get in line at the optical center. unless you use a phone camera to shoot the QR camera. I hate that: for most of my life, I was phoneless, and now I am obligated to pay for a service and device that I don’t care for.
I missed using the Playstation Portable in college. It was a fun handheld device where we can play fighting games such as Tekken and Guilty Gear and action adventure games God of war, Medal of Honor and Dissidia: Final Fantasy
I think about the fact that the Nintendo DS let you animate, draw, message friends, work as a step counter and all kinds of stuff. The PSP had a Sim slot and could be used as a GPS. I used mine for media, music and comic reading on it was awesome.
Like the things you could do was important and not just the data that could be scraped from you. Like they made it a competition to make them something you would want to use instead if all reduced to the black brick you have to have.
Duuuuude.
I absolutely adored hatena flipnote. There were so many crazy good animations, especially stickman fights. Now the servers are down, and only a couple were mirrored somewhere :/
I remember when only my dad could lift the 15" b&w TV.
My first TV was one of those with the rule that I had to get it to my room myself to keep it and my first bedroom was in a basement and the when I moved it was to the attic. Fun times. Heavy fricking TV
We had one of those big green screen TVs. I remember when we threw it out so the kids gathered to hit it with a bat. It could not break! Even with a hammer that front part of the screen was intact. Crazy thick glass and all.
Yeah, I could not do anything to this thing either. The worst I ever managed to do was put a scent brick that came in a tin can directly on top of it and it melted a hole in part of the housing.
I miss putting your hand on those and feeling all your hair rise
I remember when it was socially unacceptable to be glued to your iPhone when you go out with people.
I remember when I had to leave my GameBoy in the car…
i missed the pokemon red, blue, gold and silver versions
I had no idea what Pokémon was in 1998, but for some reason the dude at Walmart or wherever convinced my mom to buy Pokémon Blue with my atomic purple GameBoy Color for Christmas and the rest is history.
I’ve been playing crystal “legacy” edition on my phone. Been a great return to it.
I remember when no kind of mobile computing was available to anyone other than corporate execs.
I want my jailbroken iPhone 6 back.
That thing was sick. Simpler, yet more customizable than iOS currently is.
And I realize everyone probably has a “things were better back then, shakes fist” opinion, but I have reason to believe my exact setup would blow kids’ minds, transported forward in time.
…Other than the camera. For sure. I’d give kids a mirrorless camera to go with it, and it’d still be cheaper than a modern top end iPhone.
I just got a huge nostalgia blast of the days running Cydia on my iPod Touch 3rd gen. I’d customize Winterboard, install emulators, pirate games. The little, touchscreen computer in my pocket truly felt like it was mine! Then I got a Nexus tablet, hopped on early Android, and felt even more free to use my device how I wanted. Fast forward to today and I feel like some sort of criminal running Graphene and just hoping F-Droid repos exist after Google locks down Android. Tech is way less DIY and hella dystopian, as we move into a full surveillance state and compulsive identity verification. But I digress. Now I’m just rambling and depressed about the future of tech. Thanks OP. 🥲
It’s weird to think of Android 4 as “early Android”. For me that was the peak.
Indeed. I was a little late to use Android. Jelly Bean was my first real experience with it.
I do what I can.
And I realize everyone probably has a “things were better back then, shakes fist” opinion
At some point, we have to start admitting that things were just better before. A lot of technology/software peaked ~15 years ago. Before it started sliding into the fucking mess we have these days.
I remember them being big stupid bricks that nobody would be caught dead with.
But, then again, i’m 52 and didn’t see the internet until my second year of college.
Touche, should have said smart phones but even the old ones that let you send T6 messages like a pager were pretty advanced cool tech vs this.
I think we’re talking about the early smartphone period, circa 2009-2015
Yep went down hill after the BlackBerry Storm
i had fun with my classmates testing out software apps which we had developed on BlackBerry Storm
Oh man, full keyboards… A dream
I loved the hell out of my N900. An actual computer in your pocket.
That company just rolled out the physical keyboard add on. I’m very lazy, but if pressed I will dig up a link
I’ve been looking into a new phone, and I’m seriously considering one of those “Unihertz Titan” ones with the physical keyboard.
I have a Unihertz Titan, using it to write this, and it is a good phone but it has a strange display ratio that so many apps don’t understand. So many apps are borderline unusable and you have to force the display into 16:9 “mini mode”. That works but not that good because everything gets tiny in this mode.
The novelty of a hardware keyboard is lost very quickly and I don’t think that I would buy the phone again if I knew back then what I knew now. This is not really the fault of the phone but more that nearly all app developer only bother to include a 16:9 vertical screen option and that’s it.
There was a brief moment when there was a tech being talked about that would shift the glass coating to give tactile feedback on a touchscreen…
Going back to something I might finally stop having to completely relearn from changing phone sizes, just sounds better somehow, even though they arent perfect.
