The LG Volt, through Virgin Mobile.
I was somewhat incautious with them, and I had three due to breakage before being given a Samsung Galaxy SIII as a hand-me-down from a friend. When that device’s battery would no longer hold a charge, I switched to the Pixel 4A and upgraded every second or third iteration from there.
Nokia n900, it still is my favourite phone I’ve ever used. It used ARM Linux, and had a physical qwerty slide keyboard. It felt more like a handheld computer, I loved it.
@ratman For something meeting definition of “smartphone,” yes that was it for me too. Also need to include “cheap” or “Bundled with a year of prepaid service”
First version of the Motorola RAZR. Still a very good-looking phone.
EDIT: Misread as first cell phone of any kind! My first SMARTphone was a secondhand iPhone 3GS. I then had a secondhand iPhone 4 for a brief period before seeing the light in the form of a used Samsung Galaxy S5. Been using Galaxy S models ever since, up to the S10+ I’m typing this on right now.
My first smartphone was an HTC (something) running Windows Mobile. I didn’t have the money for an iPhone 1 and be locked to an expensive AT&T annual contract.
I had the 1st iPhone model. I still have it in pristine condition. The only problem is I let it update once several years ago and lost the original OS.
This is complex because based on your definition; I’m assuming smartphone means something with a camera, apps, and internet connectivity. This came way after early cell phones which usually had a contact phone number list (often stored on the SIM card — now obsolete) but that was about it. I had a bunch of generations of those, including my first was a car phone in a bag with antenna and battery pack and you could carry it over your shoulder. This was mid 1980s. Certainly not a smartphone.
Then there were the original PDAs which were NOT phones. My wife and I got free prototype versions of a new Palm Pilot from a guy that worked at Palm as a bribe for giving him a good deal buying our house. smart, but not a phone.
So for smart+phone, there were a bunch of cheap Android based ones I would get as part of signing up for a year of Tracfone usually. I think I still have a bunch.
Then eventually to the light side with expensive Apple phones, but those didn’t even exist in the early days.
@yakkoTDI That Nokia seems pretty cool for the time. I had a Nokia cell phone for a while that looked like the closed version but no flip-open smartphone feature.
I’m assuming smartphone means something with a camera, apps, and internet connectivity
That sounds like my old flip cell, a Nokia 6101, which was considered “dumb” (I also had the 6100, a “candy bar” model that was even “dumber”). Though by today, there’s a definition called “feature phone” for the old Java devices. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_phone https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_6101
Eventually I came to the HTC Liberty/Aria, the LG G2 (I still like it and its IR blaster; too bad the internals are half fused that it becomes a real battery intensive remote control), the OnePlus 2, the Pixel 4a, and now the Pixel 4a 5G. I’m both a late adopter and know how to stretch the battery life of my phone. (I’m not a fan of how newer phones are bigger and heavier than the 4a)
@Mehlachi yes it was a weird attempt. I got one too because it was same price as the included year of Amazon Prime. Don’t think I ever activated as a phone. Stopped playing with it. I think I still have it somewhere.
The earliest smart(-ish) device I had was a Samsung mini-tablet. With a 5" screen, it was about the size of some smart phones today. I installed an app that could make and receive phone calls over WiFi (I did not yet have an actual cell phone at that point). Worked pretty well, for example, to make calls from a hotel room on their WiFi.
Can’t believe I’m the only one saying Palm Treo. I miss that thing. I still think I was faster at writing Palm “graffiti” than I am at typing on screen.
Used iphone - a 5 something or other. I’ve only had 3 - that, an SE, and now a 12 mini (the later 2 bought on Black Friday sales at really good prices). Before that I had a not smart flip phone.
Had two of those huge Motorola bag phones. Maybe those were my first ones. Not certain.
These were the sort of phones that anybody could snoop with the radio scanner because the transmissions weren’t encrypted
These had huge batteries and super powerful antennas.
In my case that was needed because I was spending so much time in the cow pasture wilderness outside East ButtFuck.
/image “Motorola bag phone”
The radio bandwidth they used has long since been repurposed.
But if they still functioned, I wouldn’t mind having one around today
(Having had to call road service a time or two when I had to walk to the top of the nearest hill or hold the phone high above my head in order to get one bar.)
/image “Motorola bag phone” 2
—-
Oops I miss read the question is first cell phone not first smart phone
I think the Motorola back phone was the first cell phone or maybe I had a little phone for the pocket and then this thing in the car with two different numbers on them. I don’t remember.
First smart phone was the Kyocera that ran Palm OS.
My first smartphone was the HTC Verizon xv6800. It was the last smartphone that Verizon would allow on their network without being forced to have a data plan! It ran a relatively full-blown windows-based OS. It had on-board storage for a collapsible stylus, plus full fold out keyboard. I got into XDA and learned how to cook my own roms in the rom kitchen, and I even had Tomtom software running on it to give me GPS capabilities (unheard of at the time!).
Being windows based, I could run standard .exe files, so I had many different game emulators and roms for all my favorite super plumber sibling side scrolling adventures!
The Nokia 3310/3410 supported 3D graphics on a monochrome screen with a pitiable resolution of 84 x 48 (compared to the 2000 or 4000 resolutions of today’s phones)
That’s bonkers to think developers were trying to maximize the heck out of what they had
Best part about it was when you went entered a web address you could do other things on your phone and it would let you know when the web page was loaded. Don’t know why they can’t still use that technology. I know pages load faster in general now, but sometimes they can be soooo sloooow!
Mine was a Palm Treo 180g running on VoiceStream Wireless which eventually became T-Mobile USA. I think I got the phone around 1993. The “g” is important because the Treo 180g (and its successor, the 270g) had an included stylus you could use to write on the screen like a notepad using a writing script Palm called Graffiti. It was fabulous and so much faster than using the keyboard. Once you got good at it, you’d have very few errors in wiriting. The phone did voice, texting, internet, had apps to read ebooks (their own format), and games. T-Mobile was one of the first (maybe, the first) to use GSM instead of CDMA, making the phone usable outside of the US.
I think it was an LG Android but it could have been something else I don’t really remember. I know it had an external keyboard
Nokia.
@yakkoTDI Same, specifically an N95
Motorola brick
LG Cherry Chocolate with the slide up for the number pad. Was that really almost 20 years ago?
A Motorola windows phone. I think maybe it was the Blackjack.
It was a Windows phone, but I can’t remember the make and model.
HTC Evo 4G
@isokramer Mine was too. Loved that phone, just wish it had more memory at the time. The 3D version was a dud.
@heartny @isokramer
Had one of these. Quite liked it. First android phone.
Nokia Symbian, died quickly after Android matured
Blackberry 8820. Great phone.
The original Samsung Galaxy S, the first edition. Great phone for the time!
Does this count? Kyocera made a phone + Palm pilot. I bought mine at CompUSA.
/image Kyocera 6035
@narfcake definitely counts
@DLPanther @narfcake I agree, it counts. Mine was same brand, different model (7135)
@narfcake
Had one of these and loved it.
Nokia
HTC, i cannot remember the model. I went through two HTC models before I finally switched to Samsung
I was a late adopter, so it was a Samsung S4.
The LG Volt, through Virgin Mobile.
I was somewhat incautious with them, and I had three due to breakage before being given a Samsung Galaxy SIII as a hand-me-down from a friend. When that device’s battery would no longer hold a charge, I switched to the Pixel 4A and upgraded every second or third iteration from there.
Nokia n900, it still is my favourite phone I’ve ever used. It used ARM Linux, and had a physical qwerty slide keyboard. It felt more like a handheld computer, I loved it.
@nobile That series was fun. I still have my 770 and N810.
Off-brand Android.
@ratman For something meeting definition of “smartphone,” yes that was it for me too. Also need to include “cheap” or “Bundled with a year of prepaid service”
Cheap, to me, meant not bundled. Phone and service were, and still are, completely separate!
First version of the Motorola RAZR. Still a very good-looking phone.
EDIT: Misread as first cell phone of any kind! My first SMARTphone was a secondhand iPhone 3GS. I then had a secondhand iPhone 4 for a brief period before seeing the light in the form of a used Samsung Galaxy S5. Been using Galaxy S models ever since, up to the S10+ I’m typing this on right now.
@PooltoyWolf sad!
@mycya4me ???
OG Motorola Droid.
@earlyre I can still hear the TV commercial. ‘DROOOOOID’
My first smartphone was an HTC (something) running Windows Mobile. I didn’t have the money for an iPhone 1 and be locked to an expensive AT&T annual contract.
Motorola non-flip phone with a push pull antenna that broke off after the first week. still worked fine for years
I loved my little Nokia brick. I learned to T9 type SO DAMN FAST.
@DocJRoberts Which brick? T9 was great except for all the citags out there.
@yakkoTDI I think I had the 3210. Snake for days
It was a Handspring Prisim (Color) with the cellphone “Springboard” module. It even had crude internet
@Oldelvis I remember Handspring but not a model with that feature.
@Oldelvis @pmarin
I had a handspring something or other for a while.
Was into palm phones for a few years.
I had the 1st iPhone model. I still have it in pristine condition. The only problem is I let it update once several years ago and lost the original OS.
This is complex because based on your definition; I’m assuming smartphone means something with a camera, apps, and internet connectivity. This came way after early cell phones which usually had a contact phone number list (often stored on the SIM card — now obsolete) but that was about it. I had a bunch of generations of those, including my first was a car phone in a bag with antenna and battery pack and you could carry it over your shoulder. This was mid 1980s. Certainly not a smartphone.
Then there were the original PDAs which were NOT phones. My wife and I got free prototype versions of a new Palm Pilot from a guy that worked at Palm as a bribe for giving him a good deal buying our house. smart, but not a phone.
So for smart+phone, there were a bunch of cheap Android based ones I would get as part of signing up for a year of Tracfone usually. I think I still have a bunch.
Then eventually to the light side with expensive Apple phones, but those didn’t even exist in the early days.
@pmarin Cameras are not a requirement to be a smartphone. For example the Nokia 9000 Communicator.
@yakkoTDI That Nokia seems pretty cool for the time. I had a Nokia cell phone for a while that looked like the closed version but no flip-open smartphone feature.
That sounds like my old flip cell, a Nokia 6101, which was considered “dumb” (I also had the 6100, a “candy bar” model that was even “dumber”). Though by today, there’s a definition called “feature phone” for the old Java devices.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_phone
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_6101
Eventually I came to the HTC Liberty/Aria, the LG G2 (I still like it and its IR blaster; too bad the internals are half fused that it becomes a real battery intensive remote control), the OnePlus 2, the Pixel 4a, and now the Pixel 4a 5G. I’m both a late adopter and know how to stretch the battery life of my phone. (I’m not a fan of how newer phones are bigger and heavier than the 4a)
LG something something
@tinamarie1974
/image something something darkside
The Fire Phone
@Mehlachi yes it was a weird attempt. I got one too because it was same price as the included year of Amazon Prime. Don’t think I ever activated as a phone. Stopped playing with it. I think I still have it somewhere.
@Mehlachi @pmarin
These were good for getting kindle book read aloud. So at one point a had two purchased on ebay (a few years after the discontinuation) just for that
Nowadays any android or iOS device will do it if they are reasonably recent
Fire tablets have always done it, but I wanted something that would fit in the pocket and that also had Bluetooth
/image “Amazon Fire phone”
I don’t remember…
My first cell phone was a Motorola StarTAC. I remember we could only send a couple text messages a month and had less than 300 minutes of calling.
My first was an HTC Droid Incredible.
Samsung model called something or other about rockets.
The earliest smart(-ish) device I had was a Samsung mini-tablet. With a 5" screen, it was about the size of some smart phones today. I installed an app that could make and receive phone calls over WiFi (I did not yet have an actual cell phone at that point). Worked pretty well, for example, to make calls from a hotel room on their WiFi.
Can’t believe I’m the only one saying Palm Treo. I miss that thing. I still think I was faster at writing Palm “graffiti” than I am at typing on screen.
@kostia I mentioned a Palm I had but it wasn’t a phone, right? At the time PDAs were separate from cell phones.
@kostia
I had several of these. But not my first phone running palm OS, that was my wonderful Kyocera Palm OS phone.
Used iphone - a 5 something or other. I’ve only had 3 - that, an SE, and now a 12 mini (the later 2 bought on Black Friday sales at really good prices). Before that I had a not smart flip phone.
/image IBM Simon Personal Communicator
@Pavlov cool looking. Never seen that one.
Microsoft Kin Two. It was delisted as a smart phone, but it had a camera and could serve up internet, so I still count it.
Had two of those huge Motorola bag phones. Maybe those were my first ones. Not certain.
These were the sort of phones that anybody could snoop with the radio scanner because the transmissions weren’t encrypted
These had huge batteries and super powerful antennas.
In my case that was needed because I was spending so much time in the cow pasture wilderness outside East ButtFuck.
/image “Motorola bag phone”
The radio bandwidth they used has long since been repurposed.
But if they still functioned, I wouldn’t mind having one around today
(Having had to call road service a time or two when I had to walk to the top of the nearest hill or hold the phone high above my head in order to get one bar.)
/image “Motorola bag phone” 2
—-
Oops I miss read the question is first cell phone not first smart phone
I think the Motorola back phone was the first cell phone or maybe I had a little phone for the pocket and then this thing in the car with two different numbers on them. I don’t remember.
First smart phone was the Kyocera that ran Palm OS.
Iphone 3G. Display was too small, so I got a Dell Streak next.
My first smartphone was the HTC Verizon xv6800. It was the last smartphone that Verizon would allow on their network without being forced to have a data plan! It ran a relatively full-blown windows-based OS. It had on-board storage for a collapsible stylus, plus full fold out keyboard. I got into XDA and learned how to cook my own roms in the rom kitchen, and I even had Tomtom software running on it to give me GPS capabilities (unheard of at the time!).
Being windows based, I could run standard .exe files, so I had many different game emulators and roms for all my favorite super plumber sibling side scrolling adventures!
Off tangent:
The Nokia 3310/3410 supported 3D graphics on a monochrome screen with a pitiable resolution of 84 x 48 (compared to the 2000 or 4000 resolutions of today’s phones)
That’s bonkers to think developers were trying to maximize the heck out of what they had
![enter image description here][1]
T-Mobile sidekick, it was the best!
[1]:
Best part about it was when you went entered a web address you could do other things on your phone and it would let you know when the web page was loaded. Don’t know why they can’t still use that technology. I know pages load faster in general now, but sometimes they can be soooo sloooow!
Mine was a Palm Treo 180g running on VoiceStream Wireless which eventually became T-Mobile USA. I think I got the phone around 1993. The “g” is important because the Treo 180g (and its successor, the 270g) had an included stylus you could use to write on the screen like a notepad using a writing script Palm called Graffiti. It was fabulous and so much faster than using the keyboard. Once you got good at it, you’d have very few errors in wiriting. The phone did voice, texting, internet, had apps to read ebooks (their own format), and games. T-Mobile was one of the first (maybe, the first) to use GSM instead of CDMA, making the phone usable outside of the US.
