Your first mobile phone.

Archeron

Even though most of the whippersnappers around today were probably given flip type Nokias for their Christening gifts, I remember a time when mobile phones were not so common, and to have one was really cool (and a bit w*nkery if you pulled it out in public).
My first one ever was given to me free of charge by the nice people in the AA (the automobile one, not the alcoholic one ) for joining, so that if I broke down, I'd be nary but a swift mobile call away from help.

Even though it wasnt as bad as the ones you see in Miami 50 (the big army style things), it was a clunky beast nonetheless. Kind of the same styling as a brick, and because it was free from the AA, its casing was a breathtaking luminous yellow with black stripes.
When you used it, it kind of looked like you were holding an oversized square bee up to your head. I loved it though.
What was your first type of that there wireless telephony thingamajingy?

AlmightyCushion

I won't bother mentioning my first mobile as it's hardly retro but my dads was a nokia 5110. Those things were indestructible. He had it for bloody years and the amount of crap it went through. He dropped it the whole time (once out of a moving car). There was dust on the screen once so he put it in a bucket of water to clean it. I dropped it one day and it bounced into the fire. The only reason he changed it is because he lost it.

Which reminds me snake was great.

whiskeyman

Think it was the Siemens C10 (the one before the popular C25, althought I can't find record of it on the web?).
Got it on Ready To Go when I went into college around 10 years ago.
I was like a brick in it's case, and I needed a big pocket to put it in!
Tis mad thinking about it now with it's very limited screen and capabilities.
Think at the time there weren't many in my class that had one. Within 2 years, everyone had one.

blah

This was my first


A Nokia 3210.
And everyone had one!

Biff11

I had a Ericsson GA628. 179 pound when when GSM first hit the shops. Quality altogether

ocj

Mine was the Motorola just before this one.
Now that was a brick it was 088 and didn't even have a sim card, the number was programmed to the phone.
Drove over it with a dump truck one day and it still worked fine for long enough after.:D

DeepBlue

The Nokia 3110 which was a nice neat phone when most available ones were bricks.
I recall being on the bus with co-workers when the phone rang after I had changed the ringtone to a Christmas one (Jingle bells I think). The mortification .
Innocent times *sigh*........

Duiske

ocj wrote: »

Mine was the Motorola just before this one.
Now that was a brick it was 088 and didn't even have a sim card, the number was programmed to the phone.
Drove over it with a dump truck one day and it still worked fine for long enough after.:D

Ditto. Its actually still working (well, turning on anyway).

keefg

My first work phone - I was an on call glazier - was this little diamond

http://www.retrobrick.com/4500x.html


My first personal mobile was this.....

http://www.retrobrick.com/moto8000.html

JackieChan

My first was a Philips Diga phone from late 96/early 97.
Back then everybody used to carry their phones on clip on their belts!
Hardly everr see that now!

Thomas_S_Hunterson

Biff11 wrote: »

I had a Ericsson GA628. 179 pound when when GSM first hit the shops. Quality altogether

I had one of them too, might still have it lying around somewhere:D

An uncle of mine had mobiles right from the very beginning, big old analogue briefcase yokes.

dylbert

I'm having trouble remembering my first mobile, it was on the old Eircell 088 network, a brick with a rubber aerial, think the brand name was something like Maxor???

Pigletlover

Mine was a Siemens C25. I got it for Christmas when I was around 15 but I annoyed my parents so much that they gave it to me a week early.

I went to the annual teenage Christmas disco and it got robbed on me . I was too scared to tell my parents cos I only had it like a day. I was planning on using all my savings and any money I would be getting for Christmas to buy a new one, thinking they wouldn't even notice, but my mam met my friend's mother who thought my mother knew... I got killed but in the end my parents felt sorry for me and bought me another which I guarded with my life!

aidan_dunne

whiskeyman wrote: »

Think it was the Siemens C10 (the one before the popular C25, althought I can't find record of it on the web?).
Got it on Ready To Go when I went into college around 10 years ago.
I was like a brick in it's case, and I needed a big pocket to put it in!
Tis mad thinking about it now with it's very limited screen and capabilities.
Think at the time there weren't many in my class that had one. Within 2 years, everyone had one.

Same here! Bought it in February 1999 and had it for about four years, I think. That thing took a hell of a lot of knocks and bumps over the years and still kept on going.

I then moved on to a C25 which lasted me up until Christmas 2 years ago when I got my current phone, a Samsung ZV10.

Is it just me, though, or do phone's nowadays just don't last as long as they used to? The likes of the Siemens C10 and the Nokia 5110s seemed to be practically indestrucible!

I remember the first mobile phone we got in our house was one of those big old Ready To Go 088 Motorolas. My sister got it for Christmas in 1998. Jaysus, they were a disaster, the only place we seemed to get a decent signal to be able to use it was either outside in the back garden or in the downstairs toilet!

If you had a radio scanner, I remember that you used to be able to listen in on the 088 mobile phones as they were just pretty much glorified walkie talkies. God, the conversations we used to be able to evesdrop on!

nanook

with the exception of the motorola brick, you are all two young to talk about first phones. Every phone you have mentioned are still in use in one way or another.

The phillip Diga, I remember giving that to an ex girlfriend about 8 years ago.

My first phone was a bosch somthing or other but i moved to a nokia 2110i after a couple of weeks. Now there was a phone. One of the most popular on the market at the time.

_Kaiser_

My first mobile (around 1998) was one of these:



Was actually a pretty good phone - even if the battery life wasn't great,
and it had something Nokia have only in the last 2 years added as standard... a proper security code lock.

bullets

Yep C25 for me too bought it at the time
as it was the smallest mobile phone I could find at the time.

One night when drunk I decided to take a short cut home and
hopped a wall into a building site It survived falling out of my pocked into a muddy pool of water and I found it 2 days later dried it out and worked away fine.

It eventually started to have issues with its RF board and I ended
up superglueing the two halfs of the body together to fix a random turning
off bug.

I actually really really Hate Phones.
I am a gadget and gizmo lover but hate using a phone for voice calls.
I get by on spending less than 10 Euro's every two months and only have
one so I can be contactable and for emergencies rather that having it for
casual chatting or sending loads of texts.

(I am tempted by the I-phone though!)

~B

Nokia 5110

pepper

my fathers a taxi driver and he had this in the car(see picture) - my friends thought he was so cool ha ha- this was back in 1995/6

I had the motorola "brick" in eircell 088(ha) when i was 12- i got it off my sister and i thought it was the best phone ever ha ha, th sim was blocked but i didnt care i brought in in to school and all my pals were pure jealous(even tho it didnt work ha )

pepper

pepper wrote: »

my fathers a taxi driver and he had this in the car(see picture) - my friends thought he was so cool ha ha- this was back in 1995/6

I had the motorola "brick" in eircell 088(ha) when i was 12- i got it off my sister and i thought it was the best phone ever ha ha, th sim was blocked but i didnt care i brought in in to school and all my pals were pure jealous(even tho it didnt work ha )

I remember heading to some extra curricular school thing circa 96, and it was a dark winters night and away from anywhere civilised.
My mam made me bring the mobile, and things finished early and we ended up stranded. So I snuck off into a dark corner and called the cavalry.
I got so much ribbing over the arrogance I had to use a phone so frivolously!

Attol

Got it for Xmas one year. I must have been in 5th class. It was on 088, had no simcard, could store about 20 numbers.

dazberry

Kaiser2000 wrote: »

My first mobile (around 1998) was one of these:



Was actually a pretty good phone - even if the battery life wasn't great,
and it had something Nokia have only in the last 2 years added as standard... a proper security code lock.

Luxury - my first was a G400 (circa 1996). Battery life was pants...


I used to turn off the phone everytime I got on a bus - one day I forgot and it rang - I was mortified.

D.

sheepshagger

Biff11 wrote: »

I had a Ericsson GA628. 179 pound when when GSM first hit the shops. Quality altogether

Same as me . . think it was about 1995/6 - had to pay extra for the stubby aerial!

Firetrap

I had a Panasonic G450 back in 1998. In comparison to the bricks that were around at the time, it was positively sophisticated! It finally hit the dustbin two and a half years later when the newly arrived family puppy chewed the charger.



Sometime around the same time my brother got one of the first Ready To Go phones on the 088 network. It was an awful yoke - a Motorola something or other that's about the size of your standard household cordless handset these days. It had horrible rubbery keys and seemed to spend most of its time charging. In 2000 I did some work for a charity and they were given a stack of these phones by Eircell to give away.

Ruu_Old

I also had a Motorola on Eircell, everyone in our family had that type. Our head master had one of the phones like below and had a big aerial on the school roof.

il gatto

My first was a Phillips Savvy about 1999. I got a Siemens C25 about a year later. That was a great phone.
I often wonder how we managed before. Arranging to meet outside the bank to go to the pub. Losing people at concerts. Driving around in the middle of nowhere at night hoping to feck you didn't break down. Leaving messages with peoples parents. Queing for pay phones. I shudder thinking back:eek:

Agent Smith

Attol wrote: »

Got it for Xmas one year. I must have been in 5th class. It was on 088, had no simcard, could store about 20 numbers.

ditto
i remember having no one to ring either

jb91

ocj wrote: »

Mine was the Motorola just before this one.
Now that was a brick it was 088 and didn't even have a sim card, the number was programmed to the phone.
Drove over it with a dump truck one day and it still worked fine for long enough after.:D

I got that one (or one very similar) on 086 SpeakEasy when I was 9 for £39 in Tesco. Lost it within a month.

jb91

Remember when mobiles could store a maximum of like 9 texts?!:rolleyes:

Agent Smith

jb91 wrote: »

Remember when mobiles could store a maximum of like 9 texts?!:rolleyes:

i remember when there was no things as text messages!

stovelid

Almost sure it was the Siemens C25...with Eircell as the provider IIRC

jb91

agent smith wrote: »

i remember when there was no things as text messages!

Yeah, I remember the whole family being amazed every time my dad got a text.

Last year one of my teachers received a text in class. She held the phone up to her ear. The class told her it was a text. She told us she knew and put the phone back up to her ear. Someone went up to help her open the text and told her to read the screen. She put it back up to her ear. :rolleyes::D

Dord

My first one was a Nokia 5110, on O2 I believe...

smashey

/edit. Wrong model.
Try this yoke

MagicMarker

Kaiser2000 wrote: »

My first mobile (around 1998) was one of these:



Was actually a pretty good phone - even if the battery life wasn't great,
and it had something Nokia have only in the last 2 years added as standard... a proper security code lock.

This was my first also... made me bleed.

TerrorFirmer

This beauty. Though I'm only 20 now, so I don't have enough years on me to go back to the real nostalgic stuff....I remember when I got that one I was only about 11, and I only know one other person who had a mobile, who happened to be my best friend. Wasted all the credit on stupid things like

'Did you see that ad on tv?'
'No'.
'It was so funny'
'Tell me when it's on again'
'Ok'

Zaph

I resisted getting a phone for a very long time, but I was on call for Y2K so the company bought me a Siemens C25. They took it back shortly afterwards when nothing happened. First one I bought for myself was probably a year later, a Nokia 3210.

Carroller16

Mine was the Nokia 3510i

rainbowtrout

Kaiser2000 wrote: »

My first mobile (around 1998) was one of these:



Was actually a pretty good phone - even if the battery life wasn't great,
and it had something Nokia have only in the last 2 years added as standard... a proper security code lock.

yep, I had one of those two, dropped it over a bannister in college one day and it fell three floors down, fell to bits, put it back together and it worked no bother... made to last! It could only store 12 texts and had 6 standard ringtones, so wasn't as popular at the 5110.

dylbert

dazberry wrote: »

Luxury - my first was a G400 (circa 1996). Battery life was pants...


I used to turn off the phone everytime I got on a bus - one day I forgot and it rang - I was mortified.

D.

I had one of these too, though it wasn't my first mobile, still can't remember what make that was.....

dylbert

Ahh, just remembered, it was a Maxon would have got it about 1993-94ish, anyone remember them?

endplate

http://www.gsmarena.com/philips_fizz-143.php

My first bad boy. It was the slimest on the market at 12mm that's how it was advertised. Think I got it in 1996/97 on Esat Digifone just after GSM came onto the market.

Battery life was 20 hours it had to be switched off at night and when it was left in the car to conserve power. I still have it somewhere and boy is it a monster by today's standards

monkeyfudge

JackieChan wrote: »

My first was a Philips Diga phone from late 96/early 97.
Back then everybody used to carry their phones on clip on their belts!
Hardly everr see that now!

That was my second phone... couldn't tell you what the first one was... it was a big blocky one and just said British Telecom on it despite the fact that it was a phone from Eircell.

FatherTed

My first:

kelle

Nokia 5110. I bought mine in Jan 1999, and very few had them then but I needed one for work. We had a work mobile (a Siemens something or other) and it was a b&*%ard to use, so that's why I opted to buy one. Whenever people saw me with the phone, they'd call me a yuppy, and I'd have to explain I needed it for work so I wouldn't look like a show-off. How times have changed. The photos here bring back memories!

Mr E

My first experience with mobile phones was one of those motorola bricks. A guy I worked with had one, played with it all day, and clipped it to his belt whenever he wasn't at his desk.

It ... looked ... ridiculous (and he was oblivious that everyone was laughing at him behind his back)

FunkZ

Nokia 3210 FTW! Snake was the most addictive mobile game for a good few years!

ixoy

whiskeyman wrote: »

Think it was the Siemens C10 (the one before the popular C25, althought I can't find record of it on the web?).
Got it on Ready To Go when I went into college around 10 years ago.
I was like a brick in it's case, and I needed a big pocket to put it in!
Tis mad thinking about it now with it's very limited screen and capabilities.
Think at the time there weren't many in my class that had one. Within 2 years, everyone had one.

SNAP! My Dad got us all the same model of mobile phone through some work thing. It was a big clunky yoke but, when I got it, it was quite impressive. Didn't have yer fancy T9 predictive text or much screen or the ability to piss people off playing mp3s..but I was still ahead of the times.

Gyalist

I can't remember the model of my first phone but it was back in the days when mobile numbers only had 5 digits. I remember my 3rd phone was the Sony "Mars Bar". I bought it from DID in Crumlin and it cost around £699. I had it for about a month before I dropped it in a taxi.

cazzy

This is my first. Got it in late 1998. It was £79 or something like that in a work offer. Got it on the Eircell network and it was quite cheap as phones go back then. Though it was so cool having a mobile.




First time I saw one in use was late 80's early 90's. Friend of families showed us his brick so we rang it from the landline and though it was the best thing ever when it rang in his back pocket. (My family still find new technologies amazing - every day is a school day. My sat nav caused the save awe and fasinating comments only a few months ago)

cazzy

ixoy wrote: »

SNAP! My Dad got us all the same model of mobile phone through some work thing. It was a big clunky yoke but, when I got it, it was quite impressive. Didn't have yer fancy T9 predictive text or much screen or the ability to piss people off playing mp3s..but I was still ahead of the times.

When I got my first mobile it didnt have text at all. (If it did noone knew that !) When did texting come in ?? Im thinking early 90's ?