Similar to the Server Hosting and OS threads that I've made, this one is about phones! Not just smartphones so if there's a feature phone that you dig like I dig the Nokia 2660 Flip 4G by HMD you can talk about it as well.

Some topics to talk about if you don't know what to write:
- Talk about phones that you've had and your current one.
- Phones that you like in general, even if you don't have them.
- How often you buy new models and what do you usually look for.
- If you use some other OS that is not Android/iOS like Graphene.

I've mostly had midrange Android phones. Samsung Galaxy Ace was the first one, couple of awful BQ's (spanish brand that was literally Xiaomi/Huawei but worse but since those phones weren't common over here back then they got some money until they dissapeared). The time I had an iPhone was because my mom got the chance to buy a cheap IPhone 8 in 2022 from her job and asked me if I wanted it. Me, not knowing how old that phone really was, said yes since I was looking for a change anyway. Considering it was a FIVE YEAR OLD MODEL at the time, it was really solid (but with dogshit battery).

I didn't really like it at the time since I couldn't just install .ipa like I can do with Android's .apk's (mainly to crack Spotify, although, funningly enough, these days I just download the songs on my PC with soulseek and send them to my phone via USB). I feel like iPhones are really , the thing is that it's a brand that you shouldn't cheap out with and that you should just buy the latest or 2nd latest model and pay the 850-950€ it costs. I'd definitely get one over a Galaxy S every day, and I don't even have other Apple products.

Afterwards I got a Samsung M33 through Amazon for like 250€ (some time later I realized i should have never done this because I could have gotten scammed real easy) which has been my daily driver for like 3.5 years now. Right now Firefox lags sometimes, the battery is kinda awful now (like 2.5 hours) but since I usually have like less than an hour of screentime I don't really care and may just wait until black friday this year (or maybe even try if it can last a 5th one...). I don't really know what to buy after it though, maybe a Motorola Moto G since a friend got one a couple of years ago and it's cheap and hasn't imploded yet. I'm also a bit of a Lenovo fanboy so that affects it too.

A phone that I've never had but that I still like is the Fairphone, since it's so easy to repair and the fact that you can buy spare parts from their site! (However, 550€ is a bit too expensive for me... T_T). I also like slide phones and phones with QWERTY keyboards (like those Blackberry Curve 8520), but those are extinct...

I'll also just kinda go over the phones I've had over the years I GUESS.

My first phone was the Sony Ericsson J132, back in like 2009/2010. I really wanted a phone because an acquaintance also recently got one and a local store had a deal where you could buy one for €25 and it would come with that amount of money in prepaid phone/texting credits. I'm pretty sure I spent the bulk of it making prank calls with whoever was around with me, very often to our home landline numbers but with the last two segments of numbers reversed... sorry to whoever was on the receiving end of that way too often! I was originally under the impression that the phone also allowed you to put MP3 files on it and let you use it as a music player, something which the packaging's heavy focus on the earbuds that came with the phone and the fact that it just had a standard headphone jack to begin with, something which was still pretty uncommon on phones at the time (and has since become uncommon again, love the circular nature of history), seemed to imply. Unfortunately for me, it was mostly just about its radio receiving functionality, which I didn't really care that much for. I do remember part of the reason why I was so gung ho on prank calling with that thing, aside from being a 9/10 year old with a cell phone, was that €15 of the aforementioned €25 prepaid credits had some kind of time limit on it, so if you didn't use them in time they'd just disappear, a mentality I continue have to this day >:). I'm pretty sure I still have the phone in a box somewhere and the phone number that came with that phone is the same one I'm using to this day!

For the second entry I'm going to kind of have to stretch the meaning of what a phone is but you can't stop me. The second entry in my Phone Lineage I would consider to be my iPod Touch 4. As the numbering would somewhat imply, it came out around the same time as the iPhone 4 did and the hype surrounding iOS 4 was pretty big even among The Children. I'd become pretty Apple brained at the time, especially after my uncle got and showed off his iPhone 3GS a while earlier and I really wanted something like it of my own. I decided that a proper iPhone 4 would be way out of my grasp and just went for an iPod Touch instead and so I got one on my birthday in 2011 (I think my parents paid half of it and the other I had to pay for myself). I recall my dad saying it probably would've made more sense to continue saving up for an iPhone and I do think he was right, not even in retrospect, I think literally closely around to when he said that I was like "hmm y'know maybe I should've..." but I didn't really regret it. At least after I figured out how to download apps... There was a little bit of an episode where after I first got it I tried to download free stuff from the app store and being prompted for credit card details. I'm not sure if they didn't make the option very obvious or if I'm just illiterate (I'd bet money on the latter) and I threw a little bit of a tantrum after my mom didn't let me use her card number for it, until later figuring out that you could just have no card as an option. Truly I was the proto-gen alpha. I think its fair to consider this part of the phone lineage since iOS 4 introduced FaceTime and iMessage, which were both also available on the iPod Touch!!! The same acquaintance that had the Nokia phone in the previous part also caused the iPod to fall on the concrete in a parking lot in France while we were on the way to vacation in Spain with our families which caused a nice little dent to Appear at the bottom of the device near the dock connector port, but thankfully the class remained intact. I seriously don't understand how people manage to crack the glass in their phones so easily to this day. There's another part of the iPod's story but I think that's best left for a later paragraph in this post. I also still have this device and it's still working to this day! Although the battery is pretty shot and given its the 8GB model, its pretty much useless...

My third phone was my first smart Actual phone, the humble HTC Wildfire. I used going to middle school which is when people really tend to enter the phase of "but everyone else has one!!" that parents tend to comply with to some degree, and the thing only cost €150 if I remember correctly. Unlike the iPod I don't really have that much to share about it, especially since the extremely low end nature of it caused me to just dual carry the two. I did get hit by a car once while using it on my bike with it somehow not being my fault! I don't have this phone anymore since my dad used it for a while and after that it went to my sister, the two of them used to be pretty good at quickly taking care of phones.

My fourth phone was a white HTC Sensation 4G. I ended up sticking with HTC because despite my lack of experiences to share with the Wildfire, I did really like the HTC Sense software it came with and the overall look and feel of the device itself. I'm pretty sure I switched to this phone within a year of getting the HTC Wildfire because my dad realized that just getting a subscription plan for me made more sense that constantly topping up the prepaid plan and for some reason they let me pick out a new phone. This phone lasted from abouts July 2012 till January 2014, where it drowned in my pocket while I was riding home on my bike in a ridiculous rainstorm, though it'd already been showing signs of giving up the ghost. Unlike the Wildfire, this phone was a lot more impressive, having a proper high DPI "retina" type display and also just being much more impressive in terms of specifications, letting me actually do things on the device and not having to dual carry the iPod anymore. It also caused everyone around me to briefly hop on the HTC train before they stopped making phones entirely, both my parents ended up getting HTC Sensation XLs as their first smartphones and I recall Djjuul picking up the somewhat more beefed up HTC Sensation XE version of the phone not too long after. In my memory he'd always been running another Android custom rom every other week on that thing whereas I always stuck with the default HTC Sense experience, both in fear of bricking my phone and also just from being content with what it could do. I think that I still have the phone's carcass somewhere despite it having drowned? I still really like the design of the phone so I think I kept it around in hopes of ever being able to bring it to life again.

Then for my fifth phone I decided to go with the Nokia Lumia 520, instead of going with any of the fun quirky colours, I went with the black one. I think at this point I'd become somewhat fearful of standing out in terms of the exteriors of things I carried with me or something stupid. Teenagers are dumb. I'm also not very sure what ended up making me switch to Windows Phone because, yes, that's what this thing ran! Probably glazing from Kurasha about WP being better at being a phone, but I think the Android 4.0 update the HTC Sensation got made it run a lot slower as well as the general unfortunate deteriorations of the device itself made me want to try something else. I had also become very anti-Apple in the intervening years because of peer pressure reasons, so an iPhone remained off the table. Funnily enough this phone's story is pretty similar to the HTC Wildfire's story, also costing around €150 and ending up handed down to my dad and being subsequently destroyed. It did really show off the fact that Windows Phone ran REALLY WELL on absolute Nothing hardware, given the phone only had 512MB of RAM, you really would not be able to tell from its general 3D and app performance. Though given it was Windows Phone, you'd be pretty lucky if an app was available. Being a Windows Phone user in the Flappy Bird and Snapchat era was not the greatest. Similarly to the story with the HTC Sensation, I ended up infecting others with the Windows Phone bug since Djjuul also ended up getting a Nokia Lumia of some variety, I wanna say it was Lumia 1320 but I'm not sure. Everyone always commented at it being gigantic with a 6" diagonal display, the times sure have changes on that front and I really wish they hadn't... After my dad destroyed my old Lumia 520 he again got some other Windows Phone device, I don't recall what brand but it was extremely goofy looking. There was also a strangely decent clone of osu! available for Windows Phone, much better than osu!droid, which I always considered a massive point in favour of it. I've already mentioned a couple times that the phone is no more, so yeah, I don't have it in my possession anymore.

That does leave the question of what I ended up with instead of the Lumia 520! My sixth phone was a Microsoft Lumia 640, similar story with the HTC Sensation where the lower end device left me impressed and wanting more (I'm a very simple consoomer). As you can probably tell by the name, this was after Nokia sold their phone business to Microsoft. I think initially I was eyeing up a Microsoft Lumia 950, which was the new hotness and also boasted the neat feature of being able to connect to a monitor, keyboard and mouse and being able to run UWP applications in a desktop mode, but it ended up being too expensive for me. The reason I even ended up having the ability to switch is because my dad broke his HTC Sensation XL and wanted to take the Lumia 520 off me in exchange for buying me a new phone. Honestly smart on his part to let me carry the brand new device and him just taking the handmedown (or handmeup?) with his tendency to let gravity take control. I really liked the 640 but still don't have much to share about it since there was a whole lot of remarkable things I did with the device itself. While it launched with Windows Phone 8.1, it was one of the phones that ended up getting the Windows 10 Mobile upgrade which was pretty interesting. On one hand it made the device more computer-like in terms of opening it up to sideloading apps and the accomodations for desktop-like things (although the 640 did not have the capability to dock like the 950 did), on the other hand I think Windows 10 Mobile took away a lot of the design charm Windows Phone 8.1 had but that is somewhat subjective I suppose. Near the end I grew a bit sour to the whole experience and felt a lot of FOMO with iOS/Android exclusive apps like Miitomo and Pokemon Go going around. I did have some hope in the form of the promise of Microsoft Astoria, which was meant to bring an Android emulation layer to Windows 10 Mobile and some Lumia phones did have the ability to enable an early version of it, but the Lumia 640 was not one of those unfortunately. The plans eventually ended up being scrapped, but the kernel level work that was done for it was reused for Windows Subsystem for Linux 1.0 which is pretty cool I guess. By 2017 my mom's HTC Sensation XL was also beginning to give up the ghost and she offered to take the Lumia 640 off me and contribute to buying a new phone for me. She ended up using it all the way into 2020 and only switched away because WhatsApp pulled the plug on Windows Phone support. I still have the phone in my possession since I yoinked it back from her after she stopped using it entirely, I restored Windows Phone 8.1 back onto it and figured out how to sideload any updates so now it kind of serves as a personal time capsule.

Before moving on to phone seven, there was a bit of a pretty funny story regarding the Lumia 640 that I almost forgot despite being extremely significant, unsure how it slipped my mind given I literally foreshadowed it earlier. In 2015 and 2016 I got invited to hagn out with my cousin and his friends a couple times, we'd just go to one of the people's houses and drink a shitload, as you do as a 15-17 year old. So in 2016 I was in the fourth year of the Dutch HAVO tier of high school where generally (or at my school at least) you get to do a little class trip to a foreign country along with a couple classmates and a few teachers as guides. The options were London, Berlin and Rome. I ended up going with London but that's not super relevant to the story. You may think my choice was bad given literally Rome was an option, but I did get to walk around big money expensive department store Harrods on flipflops because I didn't pack enough socks as a memory because of it. Anyway, like a week before we were set to leave, I drunkenly dropped my phone on the ground in my cousin's backyard and it completely shattered the display. There was no way I was going to get the phone repaired in time before leaving. I ended up using jailbreaks to allow me to install WhatsApp on my old iPod Touch 4 and I basically carried that thing around London like a phone to stay in contact with home, luckily they still supported iOS 6 devices at the time. It did come with the caveat that I could only use network connectivity when a WiFi network was available, but given that I was in a foreign country I wasn't going to be using mobile data or anything anyway unless I wanted to get charged up the ass with roaming fees. Once back home I also did the screen replacement on the Lumia 640 myself, which I apparently did do a good job on given my mom ended up using it for another 3 years after me and it still works to this day!

My seventh phone was a weird one. I wanted to go back to Android, but I also didn't want to spend too much on the phone and I also wanted the OS to be as stock as possible. This did leave you in the land of silly brands no one has ever heard of. Originally I was looking at the Wileyfox Swift (1), as phone so epic that it doesn't have a GSMArena page and I have no idea what to link otherwise. The store where I wanted to get it from didn't carry it anymore at the time I had to buy it so I ended up getting a phone from the brand "General Mobile" instead. It didn't really matter at all though because both phones where basically the same phone, both just being rebadges of some kind of OEM mobile. It was again around €150 if I recall correctly. I do remember some parts of the phone being in Turkish without the ability to alter the language anywhere, so that probably tells you who the target audience of this device actually was. Oops! The phone was a massive piece of shit, but it actually gave me access to apps again so I dealt with it and ended up sticking with it until I was about to enter budget compsci college and felt that I should probably have a better phone, both because I had to travel a longer distance to the building everyday and wanted something that could last the whole day again and because I was worried having a shitty phone would make me stand out among computer people (lol, lmao even). My sister continued using the phone for a while after hers broke and she was on the look for an iPhone 6S to replace it. It was already visibly on its way out, and while she was using it the camera stopped working entirely and shortly after she stopped using it the phone died entirely. I honestly don't remember if its carcass lingers somewhere in my room or if I've thrown it out.

For my eighth phone I decided it'd be a good idea to spend a little extra for the first time and I went back to a name I was already familiar with with a Nokia 7 Plus, coming in around €450 I think. This was my first 6" phone which I wasn't super thrilled about, but it was one of the only phones within my other requirements that still had a headphone jack, since 2018 was around the time those were beginning to become extinct again. It was a nice enough phone and the size of the display definitely grew on me over time. In the wake of Nokia's phone devision being sold to Microsoft, another company called HMD Global popped up. If I recall correctly, it was mostly founded by ex-Nokia people. They managed to get Nokia to licence their brand to them and through that were able to bring the Nokia phone back to life. Similarly to the General Mobile phone I had previously, it was part of the Android One programme (not Android 1.0, naming things not stupidly remains very difficult for mega corporations to this day) which meant that the Android user experience remained pretty stock and it also got a couple major version upgrades. It started out on Android 8.1 and I remember getting both 9.0 and 10.0, the latter of those probably shoudn't have happened as it totally killed the device in terms of performance unfortunately. The design was also really nice in my opinion. I went with the black one again but it had really cute bronze linings along the edges that gave it a nice premium look and feel. I still have the phone somewhere, although I'm pretty sure I bricked it somewhat recently in an attempt to install LineageOS on it to experiment with it. If that worked out it would've been the first time I successfully installed a ROM :sob:.

While my Nokia 7 Plus (released in 2018) was struggling to hold itself together after just about 2 years of using it, the iPhone 6S (released in 2015) my sister got for herself was still working perfectly fine despite still receiving the latest updates. This really put the iPhone back on the map for me. Despite that I was still pretty hesitant given how different iOS supposedly was from Android, not having used an iOS device since the skeumorphic days and having to let go of the dumb sense of consoomer superiority you're supposed to have from being better than the iSheep. At the time I also worried about the price but looking back the phone I ended up going with was actually cheaper than the Nokia 7 Plus I splurged on. Anyway, introducing my ninth phone, a 128GB iPhone SE 2020/2nd gen, I also finally stopped being boring and went with the red one, nicknamed the Tetophone! I got it in January 2021, somewhat funnily enough almost coinciding with my leaving of compsci in favour of a humanities major, since going into compsci was part of what inspired my getting of the Nokia. This was around the time Apple stopped including wall adapters in the box of the phone and it only came with a Lightning to USB C cable and I had nothing to plug it into other than my old phone and my laptop, so for the first charge of the iPhone it literally leeched the life of my old phone. I also continued to carry the old phone in my bag as a scuffed battery bank for a while LOL. That also leads me to the biggest issue with the iPhone SE, it put great performance in the housing of what was in effect an iPhone 6, but it did lead to the battery being relatively very small compared to the big boy iPhone 11 which it shared its SoC with, so the battery life was abysmal from the get go. That ended up being my main reason for moving away from it, especially after the battery health started going down. A few years ago, after already having switched away from it, I decided to let a local repair shop replace the battery in it when I brought in my grandma's iPad to have the same thing done. The battery replacement in both was a success, but the job was done pretty poorly. The iPad got away with it the best, only the home button is kind of scuffed and hard to press now but from what I can tell my grandma has been dealing with that phone. The iPhone on the other hand has a part of the screen that doesn't register touch inputs anymore, it's thin enough to where if you enable the reachability keyboard to make it the buttons thinner and lean to the left side of the screen you can use the keyboard fine (something which my sister discovered when she was using the phone for a little bit after she dropped her own in the pool) but its not exactly ideal. I still have the phone, it contains a different SIM card which I intended to use for whatever websites and services ask for a phone number but still have not gotten around to doing yet and I'm leaving it on iOS 17 for various reasons, everything since then has been a little bit ech...

Overall my experience with iOS and iPhones were a pretty positive one and I decided to stick with them, making the iPhone SE kind of an entry in the lineage of the HTC Wildfire and Nokia Lumia 520 in being a sort of "dipping your toe in the water" type of phone. So for my tenth phone (it feels really Something having them be numbered like this) I went with a pink 128GB iPhone 13! I got it in mid 2023 and despite the phone having been released in 2021 its still perfectly fine and for the first time in ages I have a phone that's made it past the two year mark without me really being on the look out for something new. The latest iteration of iOS 26 has been a disaster for the most part, tanking performance and being overall a mess, but other than that the phone works perfectly for me still and I'm hoping whatever follows will improve things a bit as issues with the design overhaul are ironed out, both in terms of the technical side but also usability side...

Since then I also picked up a Microsoft Lumia 930, a Lumia 950 and an iPhone 4S purely as collection pieces. My iPhone 13 has an OLED display, which means that when the screen is display black, the pixels are able to turn off entirely making the black appear like actual darkness, something I'm sure you're aware of given you're reading THE phone thread. One time while staring at this nothingness in the darkness of the middle of the night I was reminded of the fact that Windows Phone (in dark mode) used a lot of deep blacks and I never owned a Windows Phone device with an OLED display. This lead me to research if any Lumia 900 series device ever had an OLED display and they sure did! Originally I only wanted to buy the Lumia 950, also for the reason of really wanting one back in the day, but then I remembered that the Lumia 950 only ever ran Windows 10 Mobile, which to a large degree ditched those deep black backgrounds, so I also went on the lookout for a 930. I got the iPhone 4S for a similar reason, the whole "I really wanted one so fuck it I'll pick one up lol."

That's pretty much it for my Phone Adventures. I'm not really super interested in upgrading to anything else away from my iPhone 13 since it's been working fine still, but I do know that whatever I get next will likely be similar to the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip line of devices. I find the concept of them to be super adorable and gimmicky even though its probably a downgrade in terms of having to live with the crease on the screen. I don't really find the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold type devices nearly as interesting for some reason despite them being objectively better from a utilitarian point of view, but in my eyes they're just a normal ass phone when folded up and a small tablet when folded out, and I already have an iPad I barely use so I don't really see the point. Whereas with a Z Flip type device I get to yoink it out of my pocket and flip it open all cool and epic like!!!

Thank you for reading if you actually did, I hope it was somewhat enjoyable somehow.