What was your first mobile phone?

[BobToo]

When I was looking for information about the Cellnet hack I came across this on another forum...

Vodafone and Cellnet used to be £60 per month each (1989, my first mobile), you pretty much had to subscribe to both because the networks were so useless and you could switch between them and hope for a better signal.
I paid 3 grand for the phone, £120 a month for the line rental and my bills were regularly £500 per month, and surprisingly it was still a good investment. Everybody wanted to see it and make calls on it so it generated a lot of business for me.

I had the thing (an Excell M2, which was crap) stolen after about 6 months and the insurance paid off the lease. I then bought a second hand Nokia Cityman for £950 pounds and absolutely loved it! I have owned dozens of phones since then and that is still my favourite. Looking at it now it's hard to believe but they were so cutting edge, the best phone around when almost nobody owned a mobile. It was like owning a Veryon!

Edit to say I just checked through some old paperwork and it was actually 1988! Christ that dates me.

:shock:

When I was a kid inn the 70s a guy in the next street had a phone in his car, I dread to think what it cost then.

 

[lewisfoto]

Motorola 2900 bag phone -

+1 on this. Mine was the property of my employer, a newspaper in Florida, who would charge me for any call that did not appear to be work related. Cost something over $1 a minute. Luckily my girlfriend worked at the paper so I could call her anytime!

Steven

 

[Tazio]

I remember in the late 80's when I was touring with bands the company I worked for used to hire me a mobile phone for when I was on the road. Huge bloody thing that cost about £1 a minute to make calls. You'd pay for the phone and then get invoiced for the calls.

Amazing to think you could hire them from sound companies for a week at a time, I can only presume they had a way to change the number between hires.

 

[Skeelsie]

Nokia 1610 on Vodafone circa 96, 0468 018286, SMS capable, upgraded to double life battery giving about 9 days usage turned off at night.

Then went Nokia 5110, 3210, 3310, 6510, 6600, E71, E72 and currently an Lumia 710 work phone and LG Nexus 4. Still have all the handsets except for the 5110 which was stolen in a bowling alley in Chelmsford.

 

[We_are_Stevo]

The T28 was the best phone at the time, I loved mine.
John, is that Nokia the 'Matrix' phone?

Flip FTW, did seem super high tech for 2000!

Google says it wasn't the matrix phone sadly. The one I had was a dressed up 8210, the matrix one looked more curved

And wasn't the one used in The Matrix kinda mocked up, too - the whole press a button and the lower bit snaps out, wasn't ever released on a normal, sold-to-the-public Nokia, was it?

Must have been (8110) as I had three (one was 'woodgrain!'); never seen another since though...

...the later (and uglier) 7110 had the sprung push-button opening cover; now I think about it I may have adapted the 8110 myself?? :?