The photo above was taken about two years ago, when I last switched phones.
The phone on the right is the new one, or was at the time. It’s a Cingular 3125, the extremely unimaginitive name given to a device from fledgling manufacturer HTC.
The phone’s code name (I am not making this up) was Star Trek, due in part to its futuristic styling. And it had the technology to back it up on the inside, too: Windows Mobile 5.0, baby. It was slow to start, slow to turn off, and slow to perform some totally inessential operations like opening a text message, but that thing synchronized contacts and calendars like synchronizing contacts and calendars was going out of style, which it definitely wasn’t in 2007.
Phones are our generation’s most persistent fashion accessory, like a piece of clothing you wear every day for two years. And if you’re a big geek like me, you do a lot with that little hunk of cheaply manufactured plastic and silicon. It’s a little sad to see it go. It took a beating, that thing–in its later years, it was covered in duct tape and frequently turned itself off, as though it had acquired the gradual narcolepsy of the elderly.
There are hundreds of text messages from Kelly on that phone–I never could bring myself to delete them–and calendar appointments recording, in sporadic detail, the things I did with my life for the last two years. It somehow managed to synchronize the contacts from an old address list I had, bringing old friends to mind every time I started typing numbers. It was the phone I used to call 911 when my sister had a seizure, the one in my pocket when I proposed to my wife, the one I checked for messages when we returned home from South Africa.
And it had a camera, with one entire glorious megapixel of resolution. I took hundreds of photos with that thing, and every one of them turned out awful. (Here they are.) I didn’t care. It was often the only camera I had on me. Those moments, many of them, would have been lost.
Today my number port completed, and the 3125 lost its signal for the very last time. As I was preparing it for its decommissioning, I found a few dozen photos I’d taken with it still in its memory, artifacts from the past few years I had never cleaned out but never did anything with either.
So here, in tribute to an old friend (albeit a mechanical one), is a slideshow I made with those photographs. Enjoy.
Haha.. poor phone…but poor me, I can’t view your slideshow because the work proxies think your jmcpherson.org is a bad site.
I hope everything is going good in your neck of the woods.
I feel like I’ve seen that “first job” whiteboard question before. Same with the “soundtrack of my life” question.