Nostalgia: The Very First Android Phone

Sure, the very first iPhone released today, but does anyone remember the first Android smartphone?

In October of 1998 HTC’s T-Mobile G1, or HTC Dream as it’s known outside the U.S would launch being the first phone with the Android OS. The G1 was priced at $179 — which was pretty affordable even in those days — and featured top-of-the-line specs including a Qualcomm MSM7201A processor, 192MB of RAM, and 256MB of internal storage (expandable up to 16GB). It also stocked a 3.15MP rear camera, and a 1,150mAh battery.

darkfiremp3,

I had a Cingular 8125 before switching to an iPhone 3G. That phone was THICK, had WiFi B, and ram windows mobile. But I loved the slide out keyboard.

https://m-cdn.phonearena.com/images/articles/3455-image/Cingular8100-8125-3.webp

TheGiantKorean,

My first Android phone was my Motorola Cliq, which I got after my Blakcberry Pearl died. Good times with those phones.

hassanmckusick,

Had one for less than a day. I was the designated driver, stopped to get gas after dropping everyone off. Put the phone on the car. Drove home… bye bye G1 😭

argv_minus_one,

That keyboard, though. 🤤

donio,

That keyboard was excellent and the slider mechanism was solid too! A lot of the later pkb phones don't have a dedicated number row. And I really miss the physical Home and Back buttons, even pkb keyboard don't have those these days. My only complaint is about the trackball. It was ok for some things but not accurate enough and got flakier with use.

I also loved early-Android UI. The modern stuff might be smooth but ergonomically it's crap. For me the G1 represents a golden age, I am sad that I gave it away.

hazelnoot,
@hazelnoot@beehaw.org avatar

I feel like this design would work pretty well even for a modern phone. Just flatten the bottom-right menu section and extend the screen over it, and you'd get a regular full-size smartphone with a slide-out keyboard and some handy physical buttons!

viking,

I had this phone. It was great. I really miss tactile keyboard keys.

donio,

You can still get them if you care enough, some of us still use them. There have always been at least a couple reasonably modern physical-keyboard Android phones available, there are a few choices today too. I never had to resort to a non-PKB phone since the G1.

lemillionsocks,
@lemillionsocks@beehaw.org avatar

I had one back in the day got it in 09 which means I would immediately wind up with buyers remorse as t-mobile in my area was not great at the time and the motorolla droid would soon release and have just enough horsepower to do more.

Overall though the G1 had things about it that I absolutely love and things that made it objectively not great. 2nd gen androids would be a lot more usable.

The good:

The form factor was great. Pocketable, the keyboard was a good size for your hands, and although it looks like cheap gray/black plastic the material was actually fairly soft and nice to the touch. The device was also an absolute tank. I dropped my g1 so many times and like big drops on concrete and rolling down stairs bad. It still works! The keyboard was a joy to type on and I could walk around while not looking at my phone and type away to finish a chat, and the little track ball nubbin was possibly the greatest loss to history. It was so smooth and precise and satisfying to use.

You could get an extended battery and it would last all day. The rom support was also EXCELLENT since this was the first android and although everyone running anything higher than 1.6 was lying to themselves about how usable and fast it was, the fact that it got as many releases after being abandoned was amazing. Android was also so new and green that the roms were exciting and offered quite a bit on top of the vanilla experience. Things like using a swap partition on an sdcard or installing apps directly to a linux formatted partition on your sdcard to deal with the limited space. It was so cool.

The Bad:

While I have nothing but praise for the casing and it’s form factor, the hardware was not up to snuff for android. The resolution of the small screen was too low and it was only single touch. You couldnt even pinch zoom which is why android still has that double tap one finger zoom option. The cpu and ram were NOT up to snuff at all for the hardware and the g1 became so dated so quickly that despite being the original it could NOT handle android 2.0 and beyond. Which means a little over a year into it’s launch the first android device lost official software support.

The OS was also so forward thinking while also lacking some super important features. You had true unfettered access and background usage and there was no way to actually close programs if they didnt have “close” option in app. You needed a third party task killer. Not auto killer mind you but something that let you pull up what was running and close misbehaving programs or ones that just didnt have an close button. Ram was already tight on this device, and cpu limited but unfettered background apps could grind this phone to a hault. The upside to this is that using a third party rom with swap partition gave me better multitasking than any android phone I had since until I got a device with more than 6 gigs of ram. (Even then my g1 could run multiple browsers in different windows without them closing each other) .

The camera was awful. Like genuinely bad and even a slight shadow would cause your camera to be a noisy mess. It also didnt have a front facing camera so no selfies or video chatting.

The battery life was also bad. Easily fixed with a 3rd party replacement but it did turn your phone into a little brick and the back case that came with those batteries was always worse than original.

Oh also headphone jack fans should note this phone required a headphone to miniusb adapter.

Overall since I got a new phone I’ve always said if they would release a true g2 with same form factor and good hardware I would drop money on it in a heartbeat. Maybe make the screen slightly bigger. Other than that the phone was a flawed little thing. It was my first smartphone though and I absolutely loved using it.

nihilx7E3,
@nihilx7E3@beehaw.org avatar

i was in the root/rom community for a decade & anytime i see anything about classic android i get nostalgic af. while i was a bit too late to own an htc dream, i still boot up my lg optimus v running android 2.2 (well, it was on a 4.4 rom at one point but i flashed it back to stock) every few years. while i don't miss the horrible ui, bugginess, slowness & clunkiness of android before 4.x, at the same time... i also kinda do for whatever reason lol. not enough to actually go back to it, but still. something about that white status bar, square icons & the overall mismashed together ui made of gray headerbars on top of white & black feels pleasant in a way i can't explain.

literallyacat,
@literallyacat@kbin.social avatar

Bring back unnecessary physical keyboards!!!!

pbjamm,
@pbjamm@beehaw.org avatar

I still have my G1 and my G2! The G2 was one of my favorite phones of all time and, sadly, the last I ever owned with a physical keyboard.

African_Grey,
@African_Grey@beehaw.org avatar

Do they still function?

pbjamm,
@pbjamm@beehaw.org avatar

G2 still does! I dont think I have a charging cable for the G1 anymore so I cant test it.

https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/8e9c197e-bda7-4aad-b81b-161a3f4764bf.jpeg

African_Grey,
@African_Grey@beehaw.org avatar

It’s so beautiful 🤩

MrTomLegit,
@MrTomLegit@kbin.social avatar

I did not have that phone, but my first Android phone was the HTC One V. A nifty little budget device that had some nice metal construction for the price I paid. The chin it had was a bit odd though.

storksforlegs,
@storksforlegs@beehaw.org avatar

I would use a phone like this in a second, if any of my carriers released something like this. Is this design retro enough yet for some kind of nostalgic-cash in?

chloyster,

Haha I had one of these phones. It's battery was terrible but it was super nifty

African_Grey,
@African_Grey@beehaw.org avatar

I wish I had one!!! I wish I had saved all my tech over the years along with all my magazines.

Cube6392,
@Cube6392@beehaw.org avatar

I miss the days of android phones with physical keyboards. They were just better

squaresinger,

I do too. Hence I built one. And it's open source, so anyone can: https://github.com/Dakkaron/Fairberry

ArtVandelay,
@ArtVandelay@beehaw.org avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    Cube6392,
    @Cube6392@beehaw.org avatar

    I think about that! Our mobile technologies have been becoming less and less accessible as they've all settled into the same form factor of big screens with few to no buttons

    ArtVandelay,
    @ArtVandelay@beehaw.org avatar

    deleted_by_author

    •
    Cube6392,
    @Cube6392@beehaw.org avatar

    User studies with people not familiar with existing computer metaphors are always so interesting. It always leads to novel computing experiences completely divergent from the classical desktop metaphor. In many ways, we've outgrown the desktop metaphor and could start coming up with better and more captivating machine interactions if we just divorced ourselves from the concept. I don't really have any good suggestions for what to do about it, but I often think about the hamburger menu icon. That shit doesn't make sense. You see it everywhere because everyone's settled on it, but if you were told “make a website that people who aren't familiar with websites can use and enjoy” you would never use that stupid icon

    donio,

    We had actual form-factor innovation back then, for a while phone designs still dared to try something besides the slab. Some real work went into that G1 slider mechanism.

    lunarshot,
    @lunarshot@beehaw.org avatar

    It was very satisfying flipping and sliding phones like this. I wonder how it would be to transfer back to a tactile physical keyboard after all this time. I’m not sure if it’s just nostalgia but I almost feel like it would be better

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • uselessserver093
  • [email protected]
  • Food
  • aaaaaaacccccccce
  • test
  • CafeMeta
  • testmag
  • MUD
  • RhythmGameZone
  • RSS
  • dabs
  • SuperSentai
  • oklahoma
  • Socialism
  • KbinCafe
  • TheResearchGuardian
  • KamenRider
  • feritale
  • All magazines
    •