Forty years ago today, Martin Cooper demonstrated his new invention, a Motorola cellphone, to the press by placing a phone call to his rival at Bell Labs. We've come a long way since then, and the anniversary has me feeling a little nostalgic about the phones we've known over the years. Sometime in 2002, I fell in love with my first phone. It was the Sony Ericsson T68i, and it was absolutely perfect.
Just consider the specs: Bluetooth! Two-way MMS! WAP web browsing! E-mail! T9 predictive text! A full megabyte of onboard storage! And most gloriously? A 256 color 1.3 x 1.1-inch screen. That may not be at all mind-boggling to you now, but back then it was positively amazing.
The T68i was the first great consumer-oriented internet phone. It’s hard to remember how bad dumb phones, and so-called smartphones, used to be. OK, OK. BlackBerry -- er, RIM -- had some nice stuff. But Symbian phones? Windows CE phones? Treos? These were the reasons people hated smartphones. They had terrible interfaces. They were a pain to sync. And worst of all? They screamed "my boss makes me carry this thing."
The T68i was a people’s phone. If the BlackBerry or Treo was the phone you had for work, the T68i was the phone you had for fun. Unlike those business-oriented phones, it even looked cool. Again, this may be hard to see in retrospect, but in its day it was a stylish attention getter. It was a Bond phone; Halle Berry carried one in Die Another Day. It was, quite literally, the bomb.
Moreover it was designed for pleasurable connections. MMS was brand new, and the concept of being able to send someone a picture (admittedly, not quite as cool as it could have been had the phone had a camera) was at the time amazing. Web browsing was certainly a novel experience at the time. And, years before you could do it with an iPhone, you could even use the T68i’s Bluetooth connection to tether your computer and connect to the internet — very slowly, of course, but still. It was 2002. You could even connect it to your computer and sync it. I know. Crazy.
Oh. Did I mention you could customize the screen?
This was the first phone that I really spent a lot of time with. The first that I found myself pulling out of my pocket and checking when I didn’t necessarily want to make a call. For better or worse, it was the device that first put the internet in my pocket. And in doing so, it changed the way I interacted online. It wasn't just a device, it was a new lifestyle. I loved it.
And what’s so remarkable to me today, ten years later, is how commonplace and even hoary all this sounds today. Because despite how much I dug that phone, I have no idea where it eventually wound up. I think, maybe two or three years ago, after several years in a drawer, I finally dropped it in a bag and sent it off to a recycler. It met an anonymous end.
That's exactly what I try to keep in mind when I find myself getting a little too excited about gadgets today. That T68i was the most amazing thing I’d ever used. And I wouldn’t use it again today on a bet.
