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