What was your first mobile phone

[Tapas Chand]

I saw the topic what was your first computer, so thought to ask what was your first mobile phone.

The model

The year you bought it

[Liutauras Vilda]

Mine was Sony Ericsson T10, however, it wasn't the most fascinating thing to me, more joyful experience was how I got it. Short story below.

I was born in a small town called Joniskis, at that time its population was about 15_000 people. Very few computers were across the town. And I was the guy who knew how to use keyboard fast, no more than 5 of us were like that in those days. And so our services were very popular among the students who had to lay down their dissertations on word documents to be ready printed out, we used to charge 2 Litai per page, so if the dissertation were around 170 pages, I used to get 340. So this is how I saved some money and bought this phone, it was second hand, for ~150 Litai, that was around early 2000.

[Tim Cooke]

It must have been around 1996 or 1997 when I got a Motorola mr20 on a contract with Orange from a Carphone Warehouse store in Oxford.

[Jim Venolia]

'97 or '98, I was working for Qualcomm and they came up with a phone subsidy program.  Something like buy a phone and they'll rebate you half the price.  Of course, it had to be CDMA.  I got an HTC flip phone.

Hard to believe I've had the same phone number for over 20 years.  My parent's had theirs for almost 60 years, but that was a land line.

[Tim Cooke]

A HTC phone in 1998? You sure? The popular flip phone from that era as I remember it was the Motorola StarTac.

[Jim Venolia]

I have no idea, just remember it was a flip phone.  I got a serious dislike for HTC around that time, assumed that was the phone I bought.

At Qualcomm at the time we had 3 different types of phones:  Candybar, flip, and satellite.  Flip phones were top of the line, I was working on the satellite phone (Globalstar), which most definitely did not fit in a pocket.  Hell, the antenna didn't fit into a pocket.  This was a good decade before the iPhone/Smartphone came out.

[Tapas Chand]

Wow...nice stories. I am considerably newer to the arena.
I had my first around 2005. It was Nokia 6610 i
It was able to take VGA pictures.
Nokia was the king of mobiles in India during those times and we used to pay for incoming calls.  

[Tim Moores]

I got a Nokia 6310i in 2003 specifically because it supported JME, and I wanted to do development for that. When I found out that Vodafone wanted 25 quid for installing a firmware update that was needed for that, and that the correct cable for connecting it to a desktop machine would cost another 25 quid, I dropped the plan. Lucky me: a few years later I got into Android development, and JME was dead At least I got the phone for free - it was pretty much top of the line back then.

[Campbell Ritchie]

I can remember JME, and the tiny little IDE window which went with it.

[Peter Rooke]

I don't recall when I first started using a personal mobile phone, but it was some sort of Motorola brick.

However, I do recall my first (and last) company phone, a BlackBerry 7230.  Did think it was kind of cool being able to use emails and text messages anywhere at anytime, but it soon became a burden.  Head office would often send out messages and want an instance reponse, issue was that they were in America and we were in the UK.      

[Tapas Chand]

Peter Rooke wrote:Head office would often send out messages and want an instance reponse

I absolutely hate this  
No private time after office hours...