The first ever mobile phone that existed in the family was my brother’s, an analogue (remember cloning problems with these muthas?) Motorola monstrosity which had red LED for its display. My first dalliance with the mobile phone (or cellular or cellphone or whatever you wanna call it) was in the days when the digital GSM-900 band phones was first released. That was when I bought the Nokia 1610 in ’96. The 1610 was digital (huiyo) and had a talk time of 7 hours (mega huiyo!). It could do text messages too. The feeling of that black brick-like digital device clipped on my belt was, err… unbeatable (huiyo, dia ada nokia siut).

The 1610 was bought in the early days of cheap phones bought for a fixed term contract, and the small ads in the local tabloids were the best place to get them from. I think the 1610 died and I couldn’t be bothered to renew the contract. I was mobile phone-less for a while (the land line was still king – especially when it comes to calling home) until I bought a pay-as-you-go (prepaid in Malaysian cellphone parlance) from Virgin Mobile. It was the Siemens S25, the first mobile with a colour (three is a lot then) LCD display (huiyo. sekali lagi).

It wasn’t till 2003 when I had a contract phone again, and with the aid of the ex’s fluttering eyelashes, I had a good deal on a Sony Ericsson T610 on O2 (which used to be BT mobile), the full on colour display and a 0.3 megapixel camera (super huiyo). The consumer digital camera was still in its infancy at that time, and I wasn’t too impressed with what a cameraphone can really do – Hence, the images were limited to assigning the images to contacts in the mobile phonebook.

It wasn’t til 2005, that I finally moved back to virgin mobile on a contract basis to get the Motorola Razr v3 in black for free, which was released only a few months after people were frantically buying the v3 in silver. It’s got a rudimentary video player but wasn’t equipped to take videos itself. The photos taken with the v3 were still rubbish, but as I had just bought a Fujifilm Finepix point-and-shoot then, again, I wasn’t too bothered. To date, it was one of my favourite mobiles due to its slick appearance.

Fast forward a year and a bit later, I bought the Nokia N95 – the all-singing, all-dancing gizmo that I actually bought without a contract (as all the contracts available couldn’t beat the Virgin Mobile tariff I was using). It was a great alternative (check these out lah) to my point-and-shoot (I also had my EOS350D then), bar long distance shots at gigs. The video camera was fab, but was totally disappointing at gigs (the Finepix records loud sounds sans distortion!). It was internet able but with the 3G facility being offered somewhat late by Virgin, I wasn’t too keen to surf the net with the phone (screen was too small anyway). To my surprise, I utilised quite a lot of the phone’s other functions, from the calendar to the GPS. You could tell how much I used it from the above photo.

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Some of you may know my recent move to O2 once again. I’ve waited long for them to increase the flash drive capacity and make the phone faster. I think I’ve yapped long enough for this blog entry, but if you wanna know more about the phone I’ve been using this past fortnight, I’ll let Nelson do the talking.