World's Greatest Cellular Phone
Earlier this week Motorola's hand sale unit was purchased by Google signaling the end of an era. The $12.5 billion purchase ended a near 30 year run for Motorola as an independent wireless phone manufacturer. Who could ever forget watching Wall Street for the first time and seeing Gordon Gekko bark orders into a $4K cell phone.
I was pretty young at the time but the memory of those gigantic monstrosities is as fresh as this morning's cup of coffee. If you lived in New York City in the 1980's you can surely remember the DynaTAC was reserved for men of power and influence. If you had one of these 2.5 lb heavy and knapsack worthy appliances, chances were that you worked on Wall Street or had the ability to make it snow in the middle of July. Today, everyone has a cell and they've become such an afterthought that I figure most of you guys cannot imagine just how big of a status symbol they once were.
Certainly at one point, you couldn't even own a cell phone if Motorola hadn't made it. I always get a little tickle in the back of my brain when a former giant is leveled with the ground. It reminds me not to take what I have for granted and to work harder at whatever I may be occupying my time with at the moment.
That's why today I want to take a quick trip down memory lane and talk about our favorite cell phones of all time. What was yours and what did you like the most about it?
I remember my first sweat shirt gray Motorola flip. It was known to last up to a full hour without charge and could occasionally even get a signal. One time I got a flat tire in the middle of the Catskills on a cold winter night. I laughed to myself proudly at having charged the portable payphone (as I called it in those days). I wound up hiking six miles in the cold without a smile on my face, because the damn thing got confused and thought it became a fax machine. Those were the days.
R.I.P. Motorola. Another one bites the dust...
In the early 90's, all the brokers had that same gray Motorola flip phone. Which sucked when you were out at the bar and everyone threw their phones on the table (too big for a pocket, too gay to hang on your belt while seated). Inevitably one of them would ring (oh, yeah, there was only one ring tone back then too) and no one knew whose phone was ringing and whose wife or girlfriend was trying to track them down.
just buy this case for your ihpone:
http://www.cultofmac.com/wall-street-up-your-iphone-with-this-enormous-…
[quote=LIBOR]just buy this case for your ihpone:
http://www.cultofmac.com/wall-street-up-your-iphone-with-this-enormous-…]
That's awesome.
imo they've only gotten exponentially better and now w/ my iphone i can't even imagine the days when I had to use predictive text or flip it open to answer a call. thinking of my old nokia 6126 and its ringtone does bring back some good college memories though..
Shit. I just Googled nokia 6126 and my current phone isn't even that cool. I suck.
I had the RazR back in the day (~5 yrs ago?) - was thin and looked ok, but had the slowest operating system ever. Want to get into your contacts?...please wait 3-4 seconds.
Moto RazR was the coolest thing when it came out, I remember the commercials pretty well. The ads that showed it could do MP3s. Then the iPhone came.
My dad has an old BellSouth brick-sized flip phone with the pull antenna, I should just use that if I break my phone out on the town again. To many people have the iPhone these days.
Panasonic G-500 was my first phone, had a variety of Motorola and Nokia afterwards. Startac was pretty awesome for the time it was released. Also, the old Nokias (i.e. 6310i) had excellent battery life compared to the smartphones these days.
Nokia 3310.
Had the Startac, V710 (first bluetooth phone on Verizon), and the Razr. Good times. Now using a Samsung Galaxy with Droid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3310
i think the ROKR is the razr with the mp3 capability?
and razrs were like 500 bucks lol
My first phone was bolted to the floorboard of my car, with an antennae on the back window and a VCR -sized component in the trunk. Took all day to install, only worked when the car was running (but not moving), and was $2/min. back in the mid-80s.
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