Your First Cell Phone

I had a virgin mobile prepaid flip phone. Got it for Christmas 2006, I believe. I was 12. Oh, the good old days of pre-paid phones.
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It looked something like this.
 
I had a virgin mobile prepaid flip phone. Got it for Christmas 2006, I believe. I was 12. Oh, the good old days of pre-paid phones.
View attachment 364348
It looked something like this.
I had the same Virgin Mobile phone. I got it after DD and I got lost in backwoods NC trying to get to a youth soccer game and almost ran out of gas. Scary! DH said it was time I had a cell phone.

I remember I paid $20 each 3 months for so many minutes of talk time and I didn't have any texting. It was nice to have for emergencies.
 
This one.
View attachment 364338 Mine looked like this. It was followed by a Nokia and then a silver Razer flip.
Then this one and yep, I chose it because you could take photos with it. We were supposed to go Hawaii and I remember saying to my DH “How cool would it be to send someone a picture from a cellphone?” I don’t think I ever did.
Got my first in 2004 because I was going to college.
My dad was not very happy about it and yet then a few months later him and my mom got cell phones for themselves and then emailed me a pc that they took with them to show they not only got cell phones but CAMERA phones when I didn't get one with a camera!
It looked similar to this phone:
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I got my dad back though because the next phone I got was a PINK razor and he broke his phone and asked to barrow mine until he was able to get to the store and he had to walk around using a pink phone lol.
Then this one. RAZR Bar. You could take photos on it AND put music on it. I think I managed through much frustration to get two MP3s on there. It’s still in a box somewhere. Once the iPhone came out there was no going back.
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I got a Nokia when my husband was deployed to Iraq in 2002 so that he could get in touch with me wherever I was whenever he could get to a phone. It had the best backgammon game on it.
 
Nokia [correction] 5100 series back in 1999. It had spongy/translucent white buttons that lit up when dialing. The battery was the same NiMH type as the 6100 series and attached to the back. There were alternate batteries including a higher capacity version as well as a vibrating battery. There was also a charging cradle accessory (to charge loose batteries) that I didn’t have.

Having a mobile phone was recommended by a job search coach (hired by the company that laid off most of my division) just case.

I rarely used it. I had a Cellular One plan with 60 minutes per month, and only for a small, regional area which was maybe as far as Sacramento and Stockton. Any calls outside the area had roaming fees equivalent to the overage charges. I also bought it for $99 with a contract, but had to pay sales tax on the full retail price. My bill was about $40 a month including all taxes. I remember they were sold to AT&T, and later it became Cingular.
 
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I don't remember the particular model, but I got a Nokia cell phone similar to this in mid-1997.

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I believe my plan was for 90 free minutes per month plus 10 cents per text. I figured that was WAY more than enough. Then when the first bill came in it was for over $200 because I far exceeded the 90 minutes.

Not too many people in the U.S. had cell phones back then. I visited Hong Kong in April 1997 and was surprised because it seemed EVERYBODY there was walking around with cells, from business executives to the old woman collecting cans from the trash for recycling. It didn't reach that level of saturation in the U.S. until years later.


Mine was similar to this. I bought a lime green cover for it at a mall kiosk. I had it for a pretty long time. I got it in 1999/2000, when I started driving.
 
Pretty sure my first cell was a Nokia that looked like this:

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...-and-indestructible-mobile-phone-to-be-reborn
Certainly it was the most memorable of my cells up until that time.

Resisted the IPhone for as long as I could until now called AT+T decided to tell their legacy customers to go scratch.

The man would veddy much like a Motorola flip top again since he thinks the hand me down iPhone 4S I passed down to him doesn't work. Personally I think it's fine for those who only use it as a phone.
 
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One Orange network Bosch mobile phone. Bought when pay-as-you-go contracts became the norm. I picked the Orange network because the coverage was brilliant; as for the orange phone, well, it's funky ;)
 
QUOTE="bcla, post: 59943960, member: 451830"]Nobody had a Motorola DynaTAC?[/QUOTE]
LOL! No because pagers still existed;).
 
I had an Alpine car mounted phone in 1989 or 90. Thing cost me over $1000 and I remember it being $.35 a minute. It was way cool back then as not very many people had a phone in their car.
 
Bag phone. Sort of miss those days, when you didn't have the phones all over the place going off at inappropriate times.

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We had one of those bag phones because my wife was commuting weekly between Vermont an Boston and I wanted her to be able to get help if she needed. Back then, and sorry I don't remember the exact year, cell phone service was spotty at best. There were so many areas that had no service at all, so it was practically useless unless one happened to breakdown in a good zone. I do remember how cool it seemed one time when we were on the way to WDW and were driving through Jacksonville. We called my parents in Vermont and just said Hi. It was considered nothing short of a miracle to be driving down the road in Florida and talking to someone in Vermont almost 1400 miles away. Now you don't even have to hang onto a phone.
 
I think I got mine 2008 ish when I needed it for high school. I picked out a little Sony slide phone with flowers all over it. No touchscreen or anything so very different to what most of us have today. It amazes me how far technology has come in a matter of a decade or so!
 
Nokia in 1997 when I went to college. I don't ever remember my dad not having a phone in either the car (and we called it the car phone) or a bag phone.
 
Mine was the bag phone too. I only had it because I had to take my son way out in the country to see his father and my honey didn't like me being out there without some way to get in touch in case of a problem. I don't think I used it twice the whole time I had it.
 

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