When did you get your first cell phone?

[Elessar Zappa]

I got my first in 2006. I was 23 and all my friends had left me behind technology wise so I decided I needed to get one.

[Skittles]

1. 2004

only because I HAD to have one for work - I was, well, over twice your age

[LakeArenal]

6. About the same here.

Bought my first, not work related, phone in 2015. iPhone 6. In 2022 I bought my second phone iPhone 11.

[Walleye]

2. If I remember right it was about 1995 and the newspaper gave us these phones

They were flip phones about the size of a brick with push button dialing as I recall. Good times

[Karadeniz]

3. I never did!!!

[Chainfire]

4. I had my first in about 93/94. It was the size of a large purse and weighed ten pounds.

Calls were about ten cents per minute plus the service. There were more places that had no reception than had. I was using it for business.

The cell phone that I have now gets used perhaps once a week, maybe less. I take it when I go out, sometimes... People have learned that if they need to get in touch with me to call my wife, and I am loving it. I pride myself in the fact that I have never sent a text message, although I do read them. I still have a landline home phone line, but it hasn't had a phone hooked to it in years. (it is used for internet only) Whenever someone asks for my phone I give them that number and it always rings, and rings and rings and no one ever answers. I must have broken the hearts of hundreds of spammers.

[DURHAM D]

5. Car phone in 1987.

[Meadowoak]

8. Car phone in 88 or 89.

[DURHAM D]

9. Many phones later I still have the same phone number. nt

[Haggard Celine]

12. I got mine somewhere around 1995.

The phone came with a little soft leather case. I thought it was so cool to have a car phone. I could ride over to New Orleans and call my friends over there so they could meet me somewhere. When I got the bills, I didn't think it was so cool anymore.

[happybird]

7. In the early 2000's

It was Sprint PCS and those phones were a nightmare! Well, maybe not the phones, themselves, but Sprint PCS. Everything was roaming, the roaming bundles we tried to add to the plan never got added, even though we called customer service constantly, trying to get it straightened out. We were getting a $500-$600 bill every month for the two of us on one plan.

Come to find out, several months and many, many dollars later, there was a third person/phone on our plan that wasn’t detailed on our bill. It was all very shady. It was one of my ex’s coworkers. They had both signed up for service with a Sprint PCS salesman who visited their work one day. Dude had been wondering why he never got a bill but wasn’t about to look a gifthorse in the mouth.

He joined in with the now near daily calls to customer service, but PSC was unwilling to take him off the plan and put him on his own (dude did give us some money, he was a good guy). That was the last straw. But when we tried to cancel the service, we were told we had to show up to an office in person to cancel the plan because they couldn’t verify our identity over the phone. The closest office was over an hour away. My ex just said, “Well if you can’t verify it’s me, after dozens of calls to customer service, after numerous conversations with supervisors about all the issues we have had, how can you be sending a bill to an ‘unknown’ person?” They actually gave up after that. I think we ended up paying maybe half of what they said we owed but it never went to collections.

I guess phone and internet providers have always been the same and will never change.

[yonder]

11. Corporate milking machine in action. What a nightmare.

[progree]

10. 2007. My car needed extensive repairs and I needed a way to call a taxi often

Even back then, pay phones were scarce. Then had a relationship for 9 years where we did a lot of texting. I could text for NexTrip times at a busstop (gives the next 3 or 4 departures). The cell phones just had call and text capability, maybe the 2nd one could do more but it couldn't do upgrades for some glitchy reason.

Finally in 2019 got a full capability phone, Galaxy S10e $850. Am loving it, watching YouTube, accessing DU and whatever else is on the Internet while I'm away from home.

I listen to Thom Hartmann or the Bradcast while jogging or the local radio stations via TuneIn. First using regular earbuds that plug into the phone. But it started making poor intermittent static-y connections, despite WD-40 spraying. Then I just hung the phone around my neck and listened to it over the speaker without earbuds while jogging. Finally got wireless bluetooth earbuds about 3 months ago -- breaking my bluetooth virginity. Now life is grand.

Oh, as for busses - there's a "Show My Bus" feature which shows the location of all busses on a map for a given route that are out and about in real time. So I can actually "see" the busses, assuming their GPS is working right, and not just assume that what NexTrip tells me is right (NexTrip is sometimes glitchy -- and until a few months ago any bus that was cancelled -- well, that info wasn't conveyed to NexTrip (sigh), so it just gave the scheduled time like everything was fine.)

[Shellback Squid]

14. 1994

but I have a brick phone from the late eighties

[fierywoman]

15. 2017.

[Wolf Frankula]

16. 2002

But then we ignored it for years.

Wolf

[electric_blue68]

17. Late 2009...

I had moved, and dit have a landline yet. So I got a basic NOKIA w pay by month w T-Moble.

The battery finally went kaput in ? 2017 I didn't use it much. Texted my out of State friends and quick meet up updates with family & friends.
When I finally went around to get a replacement battery I couldn't get one. So I didn't have anything. I looked very off & on for a replacement.

But when Covid hit I was very lucky. I had no internet at home since for a long time I didn't have a computer then I was given one. Still couldn't afford WiFi.What I had done was getting a Tablet in ?2015. With that I took it to our library to get Free WiFi. Also on NYC subway platforms.
Also the buses but that was a more spotty thing at first. They did install charge ports.

But now the libraries were closing, and I hardly was going to be on the subway either.
So I scrambled during closing down week and I got this Motorola smartphone for under $100 that included 2 months of free WiFi unlimited talk, text and with data limits
Then they had a plan I could get unlimited data that might slow down after 50GB. That didn't happen much.

So this where I do everything WiFi. I pray it'll last another 18 months bc going to take a long time to save up. I know lifeline wtx is out there. Might be a temporary option at some point. We'll see

I 🥰 my smartphone!

For all this though the hinderence for me was always money not technophobia.
My first experience with the Internet was in late 1995 at a Net Cafe one of the first ones that was in the East Village.
Because I was an Science Fiction fan going to an occasional fan con I started to hear about Bulletin Boards etc back in ?'91, '92: pre the GUI interface that opened up this world to the average person!

[WheelWalker]

18. 1993. Bag phone.

[yellowdogintexas]

19. 2001 my daughter had just gotten her license

and I was not about to let her out on the road without one.

[dchill]

20. 2018. The last by far in my clan.

[Tikki]

21. 1996...I only used it a half dozen times that year.

It was a big analog model and people kept talking about how
it could get easily cloned so I would hide as much as I could when I made a call.

Probably got a continuous use cellphone in 2000..also the year we first went online.

Tikki

[Danmel]

22. 1991

Big bag phone. I gave birth to our daughter in January and my husband wanted me to be able to call for help if something happened, especially because it was when we had winters in New York.

[Duppers]

23. 1997

[Pas-de-Calais]

24. Work issued 2010

[gibraltar72]

25. Probably 1991

bag phone and I had the ten minute a month plan.

[Arkansas Granny]

26. 2007. My kids insisted that I have one, so they bought it for me.

They worried about me living alone without close neighbors.

[Emile]

27. 2003 my employer gave me one.

[Raven]

28. 2 weeks ago. n/t

[csziggy]

29. 2002 I was going in for surgery and knew afterwards I would not be able to get to a phone

Then in 2008 when we moved into our new house there was the problem we get no cell signal in the house. We're over a ridge from the closest cell tower (about 2-3 miles to our southwest) and the nearest cell tower on this side of the ridge is about ten miles away.

Until they developed smart phones that could get calls through WiFi, we were out of luck. When my landline went down one winter I had to spend nearly an hour outside in a drizzle at 37 F just to get a tech scheduled for repair.

It's still a problem. Apparently the CenturyLink support people do not understand rural living and being without a cell signal. Last time (in February) my internet went out, the only way to contact them for repair was to drive somewhere with WiFI (Walmart) and use their Chat function. That's after the tech scheduled for a Saturday claimed he tried to call us (on the cell that we had TOLD them was not working rather than the landline that was) and couldn't reach us or find our location.

[mnhtnbb]

30. Probably around 2005 or 2006

I resisted smart phones until 2017. Didn't really think I needed a pocket size go everywhere computer with a camera.

Can't imagine not having one now. Oddly enough, my cell phone is now used less for phone calls than all its other purposes.