I’m continuing to find all sorts of dubious treasures in my Drawer of Forgotten Technology. This Wednesday, I’m featuring these two beauties:
I’m trying to sell these two phones on eBay, so if you’re hankering for ancient flip phone technology, now’s your chance!
I used these phones for years. I was way behind the curve on adopting smartphone technology. When the black flip phone broke one morning, I finally made the switch… to a Windows Phone! 😣 I loved that phone, but by that point, the Windows Phone OS had zero app support, and I directly attribute it with a serious off-season in my dating life (which, in retrospect, was a good thing, because now I’m marrying the love of my life).
But I digress. People tend to romanticize flip phones now because they allowed one to be relatively disconnected, and were only really good for calls and some limited texting (you had to hit a number one, two, or three times depending on what letter you wanted to use; somehow, I got really fast at writing text messages that were exactly the right number of characters for one message). You could still keep in touch with people, but these phones weren’t constantly bombarding you with notifications, apps, games, distractions, etc., etc. That said, the massive functionality of the modern smartphone is hard to pass up, even if they’re destroying society.
But I digress once again! Here are some photos of these beautiful little LG smartphones:
There really is something nice about their simplicity. Hopefully someone will pay me eight bucks for them.
I also made a couple of YouTube Shorts about these plucky little phones, the second of which shows how one of them miraculously booted, even though it is missing a battery (before you call the Vatican, it was plugged into power, but the phone normally won’t boot; watch the videos for more details):
What was your first mobile phone? Did anyone have one of those massive bag phones, or a car phone? Did anyone have the legendary Motorola RAZR (my first phone, which I purchased at the age of twenty-one as I headed off to graduate school)?
Leave a comment and let me know!
—TPP
The Portly Politico 
Wow! They’re practically modern compared to our mobile! We share one and it’s only a in-case-of-emergency phone. Otherwise, any other communication is email, letters and the landline phone. We’re old school and so is our phone. It doesn’t flip, there are no games, no camera and if you want to send a text, you have to prepare to watch your hair turn grey in the process.
But it works and thankfully, we haven’t had to test its metal in an emergency. Let’s hope it stays like that!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Dang, you’re really kicking it old school! Kudos to you and Tina for living that 1990s lifestyle, my man.
LikeLiked by 1 person
We’re pretty retro with a lot of things. A lot of music we listen to are 70s/80s/90s punk, metal and electro, we watch current TV and film but our favourites tend to be pre 2000 – we brushed off another viewing of Yes, Minister/PM last night. Gaming aside, there’s not a lot about the modern scene that’s all that enticing. And as far as the political landscape goes, not much has changed since the conflict of Rome.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I hear you, my friend. Love the classics of the 1970s-1990s. I started watching a horror series last night on Shudder from 2013, and it was wild how much better it was given that it came out right before all the wokeness fully exploded.
Eventually, I’m going to pick up the remake of Oblivion. It looks amazing.
LikeLike
I had the exact model on the left before shifting to a slide type phone c. 2011 That finally became an android smartphone in 2017. I have learned not to push the technology curve having mad many wrong choices (can you say Betamax 🙂 ) in the past.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have always heard that Betamax made more sense in terms of sheer quality, but VHS was far more accessible and affordable. Is that accurate?
Pretty wild that we had the same phone! Awesome.
LikeLike
Betamax had better overall quality (picture and sound) and slightly better durability (due both to Sony controlling tape production AND that the Play mechanism was slightly better). VHS played longer on one tape (3 hrs, 6 in some recording modes) whereas Beta could only handle a smidge over 2 hrs. Thus anything longer than 2 Hrs (e.g. The Right Stuff, Sound of Music etc) had to go two 2 tapes and thus was more expensive than its VHS equivalent. Also Sony being the ONLY source for Beta both the hardware and the media were more expensive. The thing that is truly alleged to have doomed Beta is that Sony would NOT allow anything with above an R rating to be on a Beta tape (they controlled the production facilities). The VHS group (including Panasonic and Mitsubishi) pretty much took the view that controlling content wasn’t their schtick. So all the X rated stuff was on the VHS systems. Over time VHS fixed some of their technical stuff and ultimately VHS won out but many arguments I’ve seen noted the unavailbilty of porn as the final nail in the Beta coffin
Today we’d look at VHS or Beta output and cringe. Its about 320 line vertical up to 480 vertical interlaced (every other line displayed at 60Hz so effectively 30Hz as all TV was until into the late 90’s). This compares with 720p (720 lines all refreshed at 60 Hz) of most DVD’s or the 1024p HD of Bluray or 2048p of UHD. And of course in the 200o’s we changed the horizontal aspect ratio to more closely match cinema (Which had ironically added the wider aspect ratio of Cinemascope and its cousins to deal with that new nuisance, the TV in the 50’s).
LikeLike