Yep, I have jumped onto the bandwagon of smartphones! Practically everyone I knew had a smartphone and when I finally realized it, I was taken aback! Was I seriously the only person who had a basic feature phone still?! Of course I wasn’t, but among my peers in college and my friends…yes, I was.

My history of cell phones is kind of funny. To skip long-winded history, go straight below for current phone & pics.

 

Phone history:

When I was in middle school (~2001-2004), kids were starting to get cell phones. I never had one, even despite a “dramatic” little incident in 8th grade. I was a drama and choir kid, so we had a lot of practices after school. One day I told my mom in the morning that I didn’t need to be picked up afterwards because I was going home with one of my best friends after rehearsal. We had so much fun that it was already 8pm and suddenly my brother shows up at the front door of my friend’s house, saying I was in big trouble. That was a big WTF-is-going-on kind of moment. For some reason my mom didn’t pay attention to me at all when I told her about going to my friends house…so the entire evening they thought I had been kidnapped and had called the police. *face palm* You see, if I had a cell phone at that point, it wouldn’t have been an issue. Which I can understand why parents would give kids nowadays a cell phone even if they don’t really need one. Despite that silly incident, I STILL wasn’t given a cell phone yet.

In high school, my ex and my friends chipped in to buy me a pre-paid cell phone for my birthday. It was very thoughtful of them. I still couldn’t use it to talk and text much, but it was definitely convenient. I had that flip phone for a while until finally my family added me to their plan because I absolutely needed it for college, and I got a purple flip phone with Verizon. I had that phone for a few years in high school and for more than half of college. It was an OLD phone…I had to put tape over the back cover to prevent it from falling out and the battery died within a few hours until I finally bought a replacement battery and back cover.

Thankfully, after many years with that old phone, I upgraded to a qwerty board sliding phone – still a feature phone only. But at least I didn’t have to use the old T9 way of typing on a flip phone anymore. I really loved that phone. But as my luck would have it…only a few months after I had the phone, it got ran over by a car. LOL. In my own driveway. I guess it fell out of my pocket one day and it landed on the driveway (which slopes down to the sidewalk/gutter).

I thought I had lost it, but I found it had been run over and dragged all the way down to the gutter area. It was slightly wet and my hard case covering the phone had a tire mark on it. LOL. To this day we still don’t know if it was my dad’s car or my boyfriend’s car that actually ran it over, but it wouldn’t matter if we did know. That phone is useless to me now. Miraculously that was a pretty damn good cover because the phone looked brand new…the only issue was the LCD screen. It seemed to be messed up on the inside (no damage on the outside) because it was a jumbled screen of nothingness when I turned it on. So I had to shell out money to buy the same used phone on ebay.

 

My first smartphone:

After my 2 year contract was up, my family switched from Verizon’s pricy (but quality) plans over to T-Mobile. Service isn’t as great, but it is a great deal because I can finally get a smartphone with internet and unlimited texting for the same price I had a dumbphone with measly texting and no internet at Verizon! Finally! …Of course money is always a thing, so I went for a smartphone that was “free” (free after rebate). The deal of the day that I went for was the HTC One S.

This baby is thin as heck! Even with a very protective case it is still very thin.

In comparison with my old phone, it’s crazy how much bigger the screen is and how much thinner it is. 8MP camera? Sweeeet.

Of course…there are two things I really miss having that my basic phone had. The physical qwerty board and the battery life. Oh boy, do I love that physical keyboard. I could text without looking at my fingers and typos were almost non-existent. Battery life lasted me about a week especially since I didn’t use it much for actual calls. Now I’ve already gotten used to the draining battery life of smartphones and the stupid typos, but it doesn’t mean that I like it. But ’tis the sacrifice we must make for a wonder phone that can give you your emails, literally tell you how to get somewhere, take quality camera photos, give you the weather, find the best restaurants nearby, and give you endless entertainment when you’re bored…till your battery dies, that is.