Emulating Old Hardware - The State Of Cellphones Before The iPhone

The screenshots above is quite represented of what a typical cellphone was like in the middle-late 2000's. They ran a small, embedded OS that was tailed for that particular phone. The interface was quite simplistic, and the phones was just exactly that: a phone. The marriage of the phone and PDA was occurring, but it was still in progress. For the vast majority of want their media on the go, they would need to maintain a separate MP3 player/PDA if they wanted their entertainment on-demand.

 

These phones were not multimedia capable. The furthest extent of their multimedia capabilities was the ability to play short ringtones and display pictures at low resolution. As time went by, the flip-phone gained more features like playing short video clips at very low resolutions. However, by the time of those developments, smartphones were already leaving them behind in the dust. These flip-phones were very low-spec, and only had enough memory for the bare necessities, and nothing more. Yet, in the 2000's they were very common as smartphones were expensive at this point. The Symbian devices usually started at $200 on up. The Blackberry, WinCE, and Palm smartphones usually started at $350 on up. One couldn't forget the service and data plans that went along with these phones as well. The generic phones were cheap though. One could get one for less than $100 new. 

As the 2000's continued, smartphones were becoming more common. The likes of Palm, the Symbian-powered handhelds, Blackberry's and the various other WinCE devices populated the landscape. However, smartphones were not obliquus like how they are today. Quite the contrary. Smartphones was something that one didn't run across on a regular basis. 

Even within the early years of the iPhone/Android takeover, these phones were still a common fixture going into the 2010's. However, for the vast majority, such phones didn't make it far into the new decade as the rapidly following price of smartphones started to make them much more commonplace. As such, the flip-phone was quickly becoming antiquated. 

Wars were fought in less time than it took to type in a text message using the keypad. While taken for granted today, one forgot how revolutionary the iPhone was when it introduced the on-screen keyboard. Their was a reason why keypad texting died a very quick death. The iPhone, and later Android made texting much more convenient. A revolution was about to take place, and no one would be spared from it.