I'm old enough that I had one of the wristwatch calculators back in the 80's. We'd put stuff on layaway at Kmart and if you owned a cell phone it's because you were like a lawyer or something and it had to be carried in a bag, so most of us had pagers, or nothing.

Yes. I remember the stuff in your links. Notice the colors are more than green and black. Also, those weren't popular devices, either. It was all about the Motorola razr back in 2004. It stayed that way, or you had a blackberry until android and iphones started to come out around 2008, for the most part. It was fun watching phones get smaller and smaller and smaller, and then bigger and bigger and bigger.

[–] Dasus@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The first color phones were also small and didn't have a screen that looked more like a black and green computer monitor from the 1970's.

Communicators aren't small, and the "black and green screen" is the non-colour version.

These look remarkably similar to the wrist device, and definitely aren't small.

Yeah, they were for pretentious businessmen. But also, I am from Finland, and they were much more popular here in Europe whereas they were a niche item in the US markets.

I kind clearly said I'm from Finland and we were a bit ahead in these things, what with Nokia and all.

HTC Dream came out in 2008 and looks like this

Also rather similar to the image in the original post.

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Except the keyboard stayed hidden away until you flipped it out. That was the first android phone. My first smartphone came out the following year and flipped out the other direction. The Samsung Moment. Also, both were much smaller than the wrist monstrosity that warehouse workers used.

[–] mightyfoolish@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The Dream was also codeveloped by one of the people behind the Danger Hiptop (T-Mobile Sidekick in the US). Which is why the Dream resembles the Hiptop line.