Yay! Phone thread!
In the past, I never really cared for phones, even in High School when everyone else had one from early ages and I didn't have one the whole 4 years. Now that smartphones are out, thought, I'm crazy for all the new, amazing technology that phones carry!
My first phone was a prepaid phone, the
Samsung T201G, got it for $20 with prepaid minutes:
My next phone was a used one I bought from one of my bosses. It was the
AT&T Fuze. I nabbed it for $60 used. I was on T-Mobile and it was an AT&T-branded phone, so no 3G or data plan for me. I could still connect to Wi-Fi points with it though. And it came with a stylus! (ooooh!) It ran on Windows Mobile (6.5, I think). It was a neat phone that kept me busy until I was introduced to the wonders of Android.
My friend let me borrow his extra Motorola Cliq for a few weeks so I could try out Android for the first time. I instantly fell in love with Android and had to have the phone! I scoured eBay and found a better, thinner, lighter, more updated model, the
Motorola Cliq XT. I nabbed a lightly used one on eBay for $175. It got rid of the physical keyboard and only had a touch-screen keyboard, that's what made it so light. I was weary of the touchscreen-only keyboard at first, but now, I can't have a phone any other way! It ran on Android and was skinned with Motoblur. Motoblur was nice, but it eventually slowed down my phone at times. I waited for some type of rooting capabilities but it never came in the period of time I waited for it. Motorola also kept delaying Android updates for the phone for whole quarters. I was starting to think Motorola was abandoning the phone.
Eventually, I decided to sell off my phone after a few months of use due to slowdowns and lack of updates to a friend of mine. She bought it for $125 and that went toward me buying a brand new, shiny phone. T-Mobile was having a promotion in which if someone new signed up for a contract and bought the new
Samsung Vibrant (aka Galaxy S in other areas), then they would get a second Vibrant for free. I found one girl on Craigslist who was trying to sell her second phone off, and I snagged it for $300, brand new, sealed, without a contract. It's currently the phone I'm using. It's quite simply, a breath-taking piece of technology, I LOVE the damn thing to death. It came with Samsung's TouchWiz skinned over Android, but I instantly rooted the phone and did away with the skinned OS for pure Android.
There have been rumors of the Samsung Vibrant 4G phone coming out very, very soon. Wondering if I should sell this Vibrant for $200-$275 and use it to upgrade to this new model. The new model adds a front-facing cam for video chat support and 4G speed support, although I don't think I'll be dipping into 4G speeds for a while now. Don't know if the minor changes are worth it. Aside from those differences, it is essentially the same exact phone...