From Flip Phone to… Flip Phone?

See table below for the full list of phones

I only had a few feature phones as a teen. The Audiovox was cool since it was my first phone ever. The Wafer was neat since it was so thin, but they had a defect where calls sounded horrible for the person I was calling, and since it was 2007, that was pretty important. We did not have texting included in my parent’s plan, so these things were literally just there to make calls. Back when you had a limited number of minutes to talk, but free nights and weekends!

The Palm Pre was the first smartphone that I remember being really cool, so I ended up getting one and starting my own phone plan. The Pre still had one of the best messaging apps of all time that pulled in a bunch of different services (SMS, Google Talk, AIM) and had a single thread for each contact. Nowadays I have 6 different messaging apps on my phone.

I ended up getting the HTC Evo 4G after my Palm Pre broke the second time and Best Buy offered credit instead of the same phone again. This is the first Android phone I had and never looked back since. That was a pretty large phone at the time, which is kind of funny since most phones are huge these days. But at least this big phone had a built in kickstand.

From there I mostly went the Google route, which at the time was the Galaxy Nexus. That phone turned out to be kind of a piece of shit. I don’t remember exactly why, but I know it slowed down real fast. This was also the time of rooting phones to customize them however you wanted.

The Nexus 5 was fine. I tried the Galaxy Note4 since I think we switched to Verizon at the time and I thought I would use the stylus (I barely did). The Pixel 1 and 2 were pretty good, but the 3 was bad. It was good for a year and then the hardware could not keep up.

This is when we ended up going with Samsung phones, which I had tried to avoid for a while since their UI was bloated for so long. I ended up really liking the S20, and it worked perfectly fine for 2 years, unlike the Pixel 3 which was only fine for 6 months or so. When we upgraded from those, Sami went with the normal S22, and I decided to try the Ultra.

Again, I thought I would use the stylus on the Ultra more, especially since I started learning Japanese and expected to be writing more kana/kanji. While writing kanji by hand is cool, I hardly ever used it. (Note to future Steve: stop buying giant phones with a stylus) I just ended up having this massive phone that always felt slow and took forever to take photos. I wanted to go back to a smaller phone for a while, and finally did with the Z Flip 5.

We had been eyeing folding phones for a few months since they look cool and the front screens seem pretty useful. We were pretty much convinced after seeing previews for the Flip 5. Since there were great trade in deals, we jumped on it. I finally got mine 2 weeks after Sami, and have been loving it since. The front screen is great for things like checking notification, interacting with music apps, directions while walking around with maps, and marking off sets at the gym. The main screen is perfectly fine for a smartphone. Especially since coming from the S22 Ultra, it is awesome to have a compact phone again.