My old Motorola Razr. I used to like flipping it open like a Star Trek communicator, but it was also just a cool little phone.
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When I was a little 1980s kid, my family got rid of a malfunctioning wall-mounted rotary phone which had been installed there since time immemorial. I asked if I could keep it and my mom said no, but she did let me exercise my curiosity by taking it apart to see what the innards were like.
I kept the dial, and it still lives on a shelf of mildly-interesting things in my house. It still spins, though the recoil speed is way slower than it should be

(I also grew up to be a phone phreak.)
I didn't take apart a phone to get it, but I managed to buy a rotary dial mechanism from a surplus store near where I grew up when I was a teen (maybe thirty years ago?). I think I've still got it in a drawer. It's honestly a very clever design, and the sound is kind of weirdly soothing.

It was such a simple yet fun device. It had really good sound and an equaliser, which was special at the time. Played loads of music on it. Great battery life too. No WiFi, but honestly, that might be a plus nowadays.
I actually do kind of miss my windows phone LOL
My nokia windows phone was the best. Stylish, great battery, great camera.
Windows phone with the tiles remains the best phone interface by far. Since then i've had to make my own custom interface because i can't go back to ugly ass icons.
The Nokia Lumias were really interesting
My Lumia is still the best phone I've ever had. It still works, to an extent, despite having fallen out of my pocket at biking speed multiple times. Unfortunately everyone and their dog uses WhatsApp now so when WhatsApp decided to stop supporting my model, it became nearly useless. I'm still angry about it.
Me too. I didn't even have famcy ones. I had the cheap $20 Nokia 520
Same. It was SHIT but the battery was epic and i used to spend time on it playing shite games on long train journeys.
Omg you know what, when I had one it was still called Windows Mobile, not Windows Phone yet. Games weren't really big yet!
Seemed so bizarre at the time, but the changeups it had made for a fun experience
Nokia with Windows Phone is great. It is still the best interface just right before MS made it worse with WP10 IMO. It is still amazing to me that when I gave one to my mom back when she was changing from a normal non touch screen phone, she immediately gets it and I don't have to coach.
And I personally also like the design philosophy behind WP 7 up until 8.1. I just can't get behind WP10 and later.
Motorola Droid 2. I just miss keyboard sliders.
The sony ericsson xperia pro was my dream phone because of how it looked with the keyboard slider. Timeless design imo
I had the original Droid and Droid 3, both great phones for the first year then rapidly declined into junk. That first year was great, though!
Yes, all my various BlackBerrys.
I miss my Crackberry. I could touch-type and carry-on a physical conversation. If I could get a reasonable Android phone with a BlackBerry keyboard (slide-out or otherwise) I would buy that for the next 2 or 3 decades. Maybe more.
Same. The Bold 9900 was peak. I'm excited to see what the new Clicks device does.
LG used to put really good DACs in their phones. So for somebody who uses his phone as an MP3 player that can also take calls, my LG V30 was perfect.
I loved my V50... until it got baaaad screen burn-in. Older OLED screens were kinda crappy tbh
I had the V60. It was a little big, but audio was great. I miss the headphone jack. I'm sad they don't make phones anymore.
I had an LG flip phone with stereo speakers - one on each side of the hinge. Had hours of midi tracks on it, and it rendered them pretty well.
I am gutted that my LG Wing's USB port is damaged. I can still charge it thanks to having wireless charging so now I always look for phones with one AS A BACKUP for charging.
But it's the fun quirky spinning slider screen is just amazing. For pure unadulterated brain rot doomscrolling, I can put on a YouTube video or stream on the main screen and hold the phone "upright", the video will be playing in full screen and I can shitpost in discord or anywhere on the small screen.
Or if I want to shitpost more seriously, I swap the positions and hold the phone 90 degrees and have whatever social media I have on the main screen in portrait and have the video play on the small screen.
It also makes for a great car phone. Have whatever navigation app I'm running on the main, and have the music player on the small screen to easily change tracks. Maybe one day I'll be brave enough to crack the back open and replace the USB port.
Sony Xperia Z3 Compact
Palm Centro
Palm Pre
Motorola Droid
Motorola RAZR V3M
Nokia n900 for me, circa 2010. It ran Linux (real Linux!), had a pretty good camera, headphone jack, sd card slot, slide out keyboard, 4or 5 day battery life, xmpp instant messaging natively. It was perfect. It was a little bit chunky, but would fit in a jeans pocket perfectly and didn’t weigh too much.
100%. I don't miss mine, because I still have it, but sadly don't use it anymore. Nokia really screwed up, they had the next generation of tech in their pockets and let it be crushed by Windows Phone.
It's one of the massive screw-ups in tech that anyone in the field was absolutely horrified by back in the day. It was worse than Zuck's legless Metaverse, or today's vibe coding changes to production servers. Alright, no, the latter is worse.
My purse got stolen once and my Sony Ericsson T300 (and my favorite lipstick) were in it, and nothing will ever emotionally live up to that phone. I loved it and I probably love it more because it was taken from me before I got tired of it.
I miss the promise of WebOS and the palm Pre series. The 2 and 3 were in the right direction, and then HP 🔥
+1 For the Palm Pre series. My wife still misses her Pixi and I went as far as making a FrankenPre 3 to keep using one.
Palm Pre the undisputed goat for me. Good keyboard, most comfortable shape, next level software.
Occasionally I miss my old Nexus 5. The screen felt so big at the time and I loved it's sharp edges
Nexus 5 peak android customization, I had cyanogen mod dual booted with stock android.
I was infatuated not with the 5, but with the Nexus 5X design in white. That era of android was soo clean
I still have mine lying around. Had to switch it out when the WiFi died from experiments with firmware and whatever I did to it in the end. I also remember downloading different camera apps where you could change just about every setting like nothing I have ever seen after that.
Those were the times.

Perfect size and shape, good button response, no distracting apps, could provide mobile-internet over IR to a laptop (eg Satellite Pro 4200)(speed was in between 33.6kbps and 56 kbps) .
WAP was a nonsense gimmick.
Solid phone.
The snap of a clamshell
OG Moto Droid with the sliding keyboard.
Brilliant design, would love that again.
Loved the physical keyboard. I could write out entire paragraphs without looking at the screen. I think I replaced that keyboard two or three times before I finally retired it.
I still have mine in a drawer
Had one, too. Here in Europe, it was called "Milestone", and I loved that thing so much.
awesome phone, i have like 3 of them. sadly the keyboards aged and no longer work as well as they used to..
1961 Bell System Model 554 Rotary Dial Wall Telephone

The Sidekick II. Bought it for $350 and sold it a year later for $300. Was a fun phone for a year and well worth the $50.
HTC Desire, my first Android and smartphone ever. I made a lot of Java applications on that thing. Maybe I should learn Kotlin to do the same on my current phone.
I still have it, but reminisce is all that I can do because I have no landline service to plug it in. It's the Trimline phone that we had when I was growing up. I think it was the one my parents previously rented from Wisconsin Bell, then bought after the breakup of AT&T when they had to let customer-owned devices connect to the network. It sits in the superannuated telephone nook in my kitchen, because, why not?
God I miss having flagship phone that would fit into my hand.
Also I miss windows phones. Fuck Microsoft, but they tried something different and imo it worked if you went in with an open mind.
Nexus 5 is still my favorite phone I’ve owned. Affordable, no-nonsense, and lightweight.
My Nexus 6P with the finger print sensor on the back. It supported gestures on the fingerprint sensor too, so you could unlock it and then swipe up or down to do an action. I had down swipe as pull down the notification shade, so could check notifications without even touching the screen.
Yes I miss that feature too. Rear mounted sensor was much better than in screen, and I loved the gesture for scrolling
I also sometimes reminisce about my Nexus 6P, until I remember the battery being near dead by the time I took my lunch break at work
Blackberry phones worked everywhere, anywhere in the world, it was the only system that worked during 9/11.
physical keyboards were faster and more accurate.
I had an odd and rare one: the LG AX490. Most of the phone was unremarkable, other than being somewhat car-shaped when closed, but it had an innovative keyboard system. There was a normal phone keypad, maybe slightly shrunk, but at the corners of each number button was a tiny raised button for each letter of the alphabet. It made anything text-related in the phone a breeze while keeping the normal flip phone shape.
So many lol
The T-Mobile G1 was incredible. I wish they would remake it for today. A slide out keyboard, and a little mouse ball. It was fucking fantastic.
Blackberry 7230, I think. I looked up the timeline, and that looks like the right one, but the article says it was color. Mine was black and white. My mom got it for me because I loved to read, and could use it to read books outside.
Blackberry 7100t was peak. First time I watched Internet porn was on that phone lol
And at one point between the blackberry and my first android, my mom got me this phone with a built in MP3 player. It was so friggin thick, but it could hold so much music, and had an awesome camera. Around the same time, my buddy had a phone with a camera with a telescopic lense that looked more like a traditional camera than a phone.
+1 on the TMobile G1 / HTC Dream! That keyboard was magical! The dedicated camera button was also pretty nice. The battery life was terrible, but they were swappable, so, I remember just carrying around a couple of extras. Would absolutely love a modern remake of it.
I'll die on that hill. Lol. Best android to date, if it were updated for the modern age, I'd never consider any other form factor. That as a Linux phone would be absolutely a dream
I miss having my Motorola Z2 Play, with the Moto-Mods platform, as a daily phone.
External mods that magnetically attach to the back of the phone. Primarily an extra 3500mah battery, but there were others: 360 camera, a printer, 3" stereo speakers, and even a projector.
I actually still have this phone, but it has become extremely slow, doesn't get security updates, and is incompatible with lots of apps. It now lives on the handle bars of my ebike, with it's extra battery mod; mostly as a gps. Occasionally I'll use it with the projector on the wall of my bedroom; watching movies or youtube.

Modular phones are such an awesome concept. I wish someone could make a modern spin of it. Maybe like those framework laptops, idk
I still have my Moto Z Play. Motorola had a small distribution in my country so I managed to get the battery pack, but I had to import myself the projector. I shoould try and turn mine on again and see how it's holding. It is still the most impressive phone to me as a whole. Great performance to price ratio, battery lasts for 2 days with active usage when it was new. It's bloody stupid that flagship phones and android bloat can't still get me a full days worth without putting g on ridiculous battery savings shenanigans.
Palm Pre. Aside from the OS itself, I miss the little paratrooper game that was seemingly, unfortunately, exclusive to WebOS.
The Sidekick 4G. I miss physical keyboards on mobile devices.
iPhone 4S was one of my favorite phones. It was around the golden age of jailbreaking in my opinion. So much fun.
If we are going back before smartphones, then the RAZR V3i was a fun phone. SEEM editing was pretty sweet. Like, why was rhythm lights even a thing?
The Nokia 6820 will always have a special place in my heart as well. It was such a perfect little texting machine.
All the time. I'm an Apple guy, but I also have an Android phone. It's a Galaxy S10 and despite being 7 years old, I still like it. I kinda want to replace it (the Fairphone 6+ is freakin' awesome in green!) but it still gets the job done. I do miss my old Galaxy S3 sometimes, the custom firmware I ran on it. My favourite was called LiquidSmooth and it was based on Android 2.1 or 2.2 (Jellybean). It was a different world back then. I never woulda considered an iPhone back then. Now all phones are kinda samey. I use an iPhone because it's boring (it's consistent). I miss when being an Android user meant you were on an adventure. Now they're just iPhones with spyware. (They were before too, but you could do more about it. And yes, I know GrapheneOS exists and so does LineageOS — I remember when LineageOS was called CyanogenMod.)
Jellybean was Android 4.3. I think Android phones weren't really usable before that. But I didn't get one til much later. The Galaxy S3 originally came with 4.0 and later with 4.3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_III
No idea about your custom firmware ofc.
I have an old Android 2.1 music player (Archos 43) still kicking around. It's slow and the Android software is not very good.
Microsoft is now the architect of a lot of shit. But the Windows Phone systems were surprisingly good, and a competitive alternative to iOS and Android. Even using Internet Explorer for its browser wasn’t so bad, since it was the late years of the browser when they understood standards compliance was critical, and followed them entirely.
Its moderate success in outer regions was delivered as an overpromise that lead to Windows 8 as a very “fullscreen touchscreen” OS, so it especially sucks that its follow-on legacy was so tarnished.



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