Sony's phones used to be fun looking way back when. We had devices such as the Xperia Pureness (2009, transparent LCD display) to the Xperia Play, with its in-built PlayStation controller that lit up and everything, excellent for early PS1 emulation.
I sadly arrived late a couple years back I got an Xperia L2, and it was just boring. It had some old XMB sound effects (the XCross Media Bar from the PlayStation 3) but it was an utter flat, boring UI, hindered by a lousy, outdated MediaTek processor. It also was a bezel nightmare, and I say this knowing my S3, S4, S5, and Note 2 all have bezels, but at least it is being used to house the two capacitive keys and home button, unlike the L2, which is just gone to waste.
I remember the E-series. They seemed like the typical early-noughts smartphones to me, and a reason I considered them a fad. At that time, the idea of a phone doing the job of a computer made no sense to me. It was like being far overengineered and doing something it was never intended to, such as a camera acting as a tablet (the Samsung Galaxy Camera, yes, that happened). But once the iPhone 3GS was in my hands, that all changed. Now I'm still as enamoured by the early Samsung smartphones (oh the joys of those bootup musics) as I was with my first Mac.
Samsung phones have a 'boot success' animation and music like a Mac has a chime, and those nuances always made me happy. Still do. I should say they
had since after the S6, the Samsung phones not only got rid of Nature UX entirely, but the boot music is gone. A very excellent one was from the SII, which sadly is too outdated for me to use, being a 3G phone in an era with 3G slowly being phased out:
There's just nothing much better than rebooting or powering your device on to hear that music.
Then there's the 2010-era wild wild west of phones with pretty much all walks of live covered. Want a tiny phone? we got you covered with the Galaxy SII, want a huge brick? Take note, well, Galaxy Note! Want a keyboard? which kind? slider? flip? how about permanent? Got ya covered! Want to play games while on the go? Here's the Xperia Play!
I miss phones being fun and making me want to buy more of 'em. That really kinda stopped after the iPhone X came out. Now they're all just boring slabs of huge glass with very washed out displays. I miss the T-Mobile Sidekick, wish I had experienced that when it worked. I never got to enjoy the Samsung Captivate, or the Motorola Aura. All very unique, like myself.
My first Samsung phone I will remember fondly. It was the SGH-x427, an early Cingular phone, and perhaps the only one I loved over the Nokia 5185i. It had what seemed the early underpinnings of the later Galaxy phones with a Nature-themed UX, complete with animated butterfly wallpaper, open/close nature sounds (I bought an open sound of the Star Trek communicator from Cingular for it), and one heck of a neat 80s-style ringtone titled 'the sound of Spring'. It ended up being so easy to forget it was in your pocket that I ended up forgetting it was there one day and it went through a wash cycle and died. I had only had it a month. My grandmom had one also, she pretty much used it all the way to 2014, when AT&T shut down GPRS she was forced to get a smartphone, also a Galaxy S4, but she can't figure out how to unlock the thing and I always have to help her. She forgets about it all the time, and the battery spends most of its time dead.
