Prepare for a nostalgia overload.
A BBC news report from 23 years ago has resurfaced online and it’s an eye-opening reflection of how far technology has come over the last two decades.
The news anchor opens the report by clarifying that this new piece of technology not only allows user to send texts, but send pictures aswell. Can you believe it?
A sequence of clips are then played which range from schoolgirls using the keypad on an old Nokia 3310 outside their school gates, to two reporters taking a picture of Buckingham Palace with their incredible new portable device and showing it to passers-by, who appear equally as astonished as the two journalists.
The BBC anchor indicates that “evidence of a text messaging craze was everywhere”.
He added: “The phone makers never expected it to take off. It was teenagers who decided this was the way to keep in touch.”
The first commercial phone with a colour camera feature was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, released in Japan in May 1999.
Contradictory to what this BBC anchor may lead you to believe, cameras on phones proved popular right from the start, as indicated by the J-Phone in Japan having had more than half of its subscribers using cell phone cameras in two years.
The world soon followed and in 2003, more camera phones were sold worldwide than stand-alone digital cameras.
Over twenty years on and the device shown in the footage above looks almost archaic in comparison to the multi-megapixel, TikTok making mini-laptop devices we all carry around with us now.
I, for one, barely remember a camera phone existing before the iPhone, although my memories of breaking records on the snake game on the old ‘block-ia’ have never escaped me.
Following this nostalgic post being shared across social media this week, many others were equally as mystified as me, while some wish they could go back to that ‘simpler’ time where phones didn’t control us to the extent they do nowadays.
One person commented on the post: “Ugh I freaking hate it. I was that generation, I got my first cell phone as a teenager. I had the Nokia and then the Razr. Now I keep my iPhone on Do Not Disturb 24/7. Good luck getting a text back from me. Ever.”
Another was more reminiscent of the early days of camera phones: “Times were so much simpler, so much better. I would absolutely hate growing up today’s world.”
One person was even able to stretch their mind even further back to when we all communicated with each other on landlines: “I remember the days of just home phones or using the phone box. Life was more relaxed then.”
One particular comment stood out as the most refreshing and reasonable of them all though: “People complained then, people complain now, people will complain in the future.
“In 15 years’ time when everyone is using their Apple Vision contact lenses they’ll complain when the ‘new’ thing comes out and say ‘should’ve kept smartphones’.”
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