5 Things I miss about our old handphones

1. We no longer get excited about cool ring tones. 

Remember when it was exciting to have a poly-something ring tone and that people actually spent money to buy a beeping version of Britney's "Baby one more time" and how advertisements will go "impress your friends with the latest ringtones?" 

It seems awfully strange that no one actually bothers that much about ring tones now, when our smart phones afford us with pretty much infinite ring tone options. 

I miss the times when a ring tone is all it takes for a phone (and a person) to be slightly cooler than the rest. 

2. We no longer remember the conversion between numerical digits and alphabets. 

The new smartphone QWERTY keyboards have all but replaced the alphanumerical keyboards on our phones.  

I never really understood why this happened. 

From what I remember typing on those alphanumerical pads was much faster and more efficient than the QWERTY variant. Even 'smarter' keyboards that allow for swipe never do come close to the efficiency of the alphanumerical pads. 

Maybe we have just been duped by something that appears shinier and better, despite already coming up with a perfect mobile solution in the first place. 

3. We no longer ask each other about our snake scores. 

We might all be obsessed about Candy Crush now, but let's face it, the greatest game ever to grace the screen of our mobile phones was Snake. (In addition, the second greatest game is also not Candy Crush, it is Snake 2.) 

In my opinion, Snake is nothing less than the Mario of the generations passed. Snake is so awesome that when I read about how it is an Easter Egg on Youtube, I dropped everything I was doing in order to play it. 

(Side note: It doesn't feel the same. Alphanumerical pads also make a much better game console than a touch screen) 

But what makes Snake truly memorable is its no nonsense zen-like gameplay. There are no barriers to entry. The game is incredibly simple. You are not allowed to buy any lives. There is no short cut to the end. And the only thing that is keeping you from getting that perfect score, is your inability to repeat a winding sequence over and over again. 

4. We no longer take our time to pick up a phone call, just so we can look at it 'dance' or to listen to the ring tone.  

Yes, I am talking about the Nokia 8250. We all own this phone and HTC, the 8250 is the only phone that can lay claims to the title of 'the butterfly phone'. And this phone was cool enough to do a little number when a phone call comes in. 

There's something exhibitionist about a phone call in the past. Not just the vibrations, the dancing, and the ring tones, but also the fact that we seem to still hold on to the image of the guy with the big portable stereo in our heads then, and having a phone that buzzed out tunes seemed to allude to that. 

Today, we have pretty much bought into the iPod silhouette man instead.

I miss that weird sense of solidarity when everyone assumes its their phone that beeped, and that probably was a bit more exciting because phones don't beep as much as they do today. Most of the time, our smartphones don't even have the volume turned on. In fact, with the whole 'wearable technology' fad, we are probably going to have silent phones forever and all messages, game notifications etc will simply be glanced at from a watch or through glasses. 

There's also all these cultural baggage that we've thrown away. No longer do we think about how many rings the phone should make before we answer it, or how long we should call about the next date. I miss all those weird cultural rules because even something as mundane as a 3 day rule makes dating seem all the more serious than just sending a whatsapp to plan the next one. 

5. We used to get excited about how a phone call was picked up.

Remember how the Nokia 7650 was super cool because it had a slider? And the clam phones that make a dramatic snap when you put down on someone? 

No one ever gets excited about these things anymore. 

Every smartphone picks up a new phone call in pretty much the same way. Slide here, push a virtual button, or use a bluetooth device. Call me old fashion, but there's something romantic about having a phone with a mechanical feature. It makes me feel like I'm talking into a Zippo.

I really miss clam phones. I don't have any good reason for this, except maybe I get easily bored in public and clam phones are great to occupy my hands with. 

Yes, I am that annoying guy in the train in 1999.