Past Cell Phone Trends

With capacitive touch screens being mainstream, I thought the end of pocket dials was upon us. But somehow, my grandma manages to do just that; sometimes multiple times consecutively. She is just that amazing.

This made me think of other cell phones trends that have seemed to have died.

Let's start off with ringtones. The frequency of people that put their phones on vibrate-only seems to be on the rise, so ringtones are heard less enough. And when ringtones are heard, it's more than often the default ringtone or something that comes pre-installed. But I miss the days of embarrassing ringtones.

Gone are the days where ringtones would be sold on TV commercials for dollars at a time and cell phone manufacturers made it extremely difficult to put custom ringtones on phones (sometimes you needed custom software). People seemed to be obsessed with customizing their ringtone to their personality or to be on point with popular music. For me, I still have the same ringtone song as I did in high school (A Little More Time. -Zox).

Then, you had phone charms. Unlike the phones of today, there were designated hooks built-in the phones for the charms.

Sometimes the phone charms would even have lights that lit up when a phone call was incoming.

Majority of modern phone designs are simple: A brick with a touch screen and sometimes a few buttons. But that wasn't the trend in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The market was flooded with nostalgic flip phones, slick sliders, buttonful QWERTY keyboard phones, and the classic T-Mobile Sidekick. But for me, I had my spin Sony Ericsson phone that was stolen in high school:

There are people that say they want those phones back, particularly the physically keyboard. I will never go back, but I do miss the multi-day battery life. Here I am again, complaining about how battery technology has failed to advance past a day of regular use.