It was early 2003 and I had just returned home to the United States after serving a full-time mission for two years in Brazil. My mother took me to the Alltel store to pick out a phone and add me to the family service plan.
I knew I wanted the V60 when I saw it. Sleek, metal finish. Replaceable battery (of course they all were back then). Extendable antenna. It even came with a belt holster clip and you better believe I used it (I miss holsters and phones small enough to fit holsters). It was a great little phone. Solid and dependable.
And my favorite feature? Programmable ring tones. You could use the settings to create your own ringtones note for note. I had the Star Trek and Star Wars themes, of course. I know I had several other fun tunes but can't remember specifics. Probably popular songs of the time.
And don't forget that satisfying sound and feeling when you closed it after a call. CLOMP.
I recently wrote about the first smartphone I ever owned. But my very first experience with a cell phone was using an Audiovox CDM-4500 or an Audiovox model very similar to it.
Around 1999 my parents bought a single cell phone for the family that any one of us could take along when out of the house if we needed to easily call home or be contacted. I was attending community college at the time and remember taking the phone with me on several occasions and using it. Although we were discouraged from using it unless absolutely necessary because apparently the minutes were very expensive. I don't know how much they paid for the phone or the service.
So it technically wasn't mine, but it was the first cell phone I ever used. I thought it was amazing to be able to talk on the phone wherever I was. Little did I know how drastically cell phones would change over the next couple decades.
I remember when those “Magic Eye” 3D illusions pictures were really popular back in the day (1990s). I never cared for them, though. Because try as I might, I could never see the 3D images.
Here's one that's supposed to be a shark. I'll have to take their word for it, because I can't see it.
I tried everything anyone recommended to me: hold it close to your face, relax your eyes, stare through the picture not at it, focus on your own reflection on the page/screen, etc. Nothing I have ever tried has worked and to this day I have never seen one of these 3D illusions.
As of today, BlackBerry has shut down services for their phones running the BBOS and BB10 operating systems, which means they lose most of the core functionality that has allowed them to be usable phones long past their prime.
There are lots of news articles, blog posts, and social media posts about it, so I will try not to get too wordy here. Suffice it to say that I am and always will be a BlackBerry fan, and I dearly miss my beloved physical phone keyboards.
I go through these phases where I try to acquire things that I once had – or always wanted to have – in the past. Even if I got rid of those things for a good reason, even if I felt like parting with them was the right thing to do, I sometimes regret having let those things go. This is probably why – although I will always aspire to be one – I will probably never truly be a so-called minimalist.
