The old days before smartphones
I've always been obsessed with cutting edge technology. Back in 2005, 3G-capable multimedia phones were a relatively new thing and everyone at school started turning up with 3-branded Motorola camera phones, and I thought they were seriously the coolest thing. Who would have thought: cameras on phones!
There were two phones I wanted more than any others: The Sony Ericsson s700i and the Kyocera . I was drawn to both phones primarily because they were swivel phones, but the s700i at the time was one of the more advanced phones, sporting a Sony Cybershot 1.3 megapixel camera (I know, right).
At the time, I couldn't believe how stupidly expensive these phones were - the s700i was a little over 1000AUD, and the Kyocera was something like 800. At fifteen years of age, a thousand dollars is alot of money! It would have taken me months to save up enough to get one!
I didn't have one for a long time
I didn't actually get a cool phone until 2007 when I was able to buy myself the beastly Nokia N95. It was nearly a thousand dollars and a months' wage at the time. Naturally, it was the coolest thing I had ever purchased and I showed it off to everyone I could. Granted, it was nearly a year after the phone had been released, but I didn't care one bit.
Back in those days, coolness was determined by what your phone looked like, rather than what it was capable of. This was in an age before smartphones existed and the ideal oblong capacitive touchscreen form factor was developed, where manufacturers experimented with more novel and more interesting ways to interact with the device itself. Flip phones had sort of come and gone by 2007-2008, and slider phones were starting to take over, especially as touchscreens gradually began to be incorporated into the phone.