The Note 9 was the last of my “greats”. I actually think this phone was part of the issue I began switching phones so frequently after this one, I was chasing the experience of it. That and the absolute boredom of the Covid-19 authoritarian times.
This phone was released in the third quarter of 2018, however I think I only got this early 2019. My boss, who by this time I’d developed a decent relationship said pick the best phone for you (me) that helps you do your job to the best of your ability. I pored through the corporate price list and came across this Note 9. The S-pen caught my attention as it would make precise clicks in tiny remote sessions a lot easier. So I settled on it.
Immediately I could tell this device was worlds above anything I’d owned before. The screen stood out, with such a high resolution and colour depth. Samsung really did throw everything they had at this thing. It had an iris scanner, standard face recognition and a rear fingerprint reader just for biometrics. It had Dex mode which was fantastic for me often travelling. It even had a heart rate monitor and blood oxygen sensor next to the camera. It had different levels of touch force recognition and haptics that just made the whole user experience a joy.
If in the UK we’d had the Snapdragon chipset this really would have been a 100/100 device. However after about a year and a half of usage, problems started to arise. The phone started to get very hot in normal usage, and battery drain became more prominent. The phone actually got so hot on regular occasions that the adhesive on the rear glass degraded and it became loose. The battery began to swell and cracked the glass.
By this point, the boss I had that enforced the one phone policy had left and I wasn’t overly impressed with the new leadership. I decided it was time to get my own number again, and split my work and personal life properly as it should’ve always been. The Note 9 got a fresh battery and back glass and was resigned to just work phone duties for around another year before it was replaced with a Note 10 plus. As that was a dedicated work device I won’t give it a dedicated review, but in short it was underwhelming. However it didn’t have the same issues the Note 9 did, but the Note 9 was the last of Samsung throwing everything they had at their flagships and they started stripping back features.
After 2 years of imposed limits from the iPhones I was sick of it. Using my phone as both work and personal, with all the requirements of being in IT it was starting to hold me back. My remote access software didn’t have an iOS version, I needed a terminal program to access linux servers over SSH and I was also just missing the freedom of Android. I bought this device myself and put the iPhone 6s in a drawer, but when my boss found out he paid me back for the device to keep it as a company device.
Xiaomi have always been absolutely chaotic in the amount of devices they release and their terrible naming conventions. It’s almost impossible to gauge when a device was released and where it stands in their line up by name, and this was no exception. I still don’t really know where this device stood, however it was quite cheap at £150 brand new.
I remember the phone shipped with a Chinese ROM, and to flash the global ROM you had to unlock the bootloader. This was a laborious process and it involved signing up to their online account, performing certain actions (can’t remember what they were) and then putting a request in for an unlock code. It took a few days either way. However when done I had the correct ROM flashed and once again had my rooted Android experience I’d been missing.
MIUI was a bizarre skin of Android though, it felt like a knock off iOS in that it had no app drawer with everything being on home pages. They’d also heavily changed all aspects of the operating system such as the status bar, quick settings and normal settings menus. All in all it wasn’t a bad experience, it took quite a bit of extra effort to get the phone to a place where I was happy with it but it was something I was willing to accept considering how cheap it was for the hardware specs offered.
This phone met it’s demise on my Birthday. I was on holiday and sat out having drinks by the pool one evening. A few people I’d got friendly with there knew it was my birthday and had decided to buy me lots of drinks. Inebriated I stumbled out of my chair and my phone took a tumble out of my pocket. It hit the tiled floor, smashed the screen and fell straight into the pool. The phone actually survived, but the screen didn’t. I ordered a replacement screen but with Xiaomi being so fragmented with multiple revisions of the same model I unsurprisingly ended up with the wrong screen. At this point I decided it wasn’t worth chancing another incorrect screen and retired the phone.
This phone was Apple’s answer to “bendgate”. It was slightly thicker, and had better performance than the iPhone 6. Looking back at these release schedules this is probably the release cycle Apple should revert to. We’re at the point now where year on year there are very little changes to devices, having an “S” variant still allows the company to release a new model to please their shareholders but also makes it clear that this is still a very similar device to the previous one. However I think moving away from this was almost certainly intentional, people want to feel like they have the latest and greatest model of phone and if just 1 year later a new product is released with a new model number they’ll be that bit more tempted to buy it!
I don’t really have much to say about the iPhone 6s, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There was nothing wrong with it, and it did nothing special. It wasn’t a memorable phone in any way, but it served it’s purpose perfectly fine.
I do miss the days when fingerprint scanners were placed centrally on phones though, at the front at the bottom or on the rear near the cameras, I’m not fussy but as a left handed person having it integrated into the power button on the right hand side is just not practical for me. Obviously a lot of phones today have them integrated into the screen but I don’t find these as accurate or fast as the physical sensor, and they generally never play nicely with a screen protector.
The iPhone 6 wasn’t my first experience with iPhones. I’d previously been provided with an iPhone 5s at a previous job, but it had been a separate work device so I’d never really got to know it and I didn’t consider it a device I owned. When my job gave me this iPhone 6 I was pressured into consolidating down into one device, and giving up my personal phone number in favour of just having the one. Still being fairly fresh faced I agreed to it (I’ve since split back to having two devices and two numbers, and I’d never have just one device again, having some separation between work and play is very important). Nevertheless this agreement allowed me to own some phones that I probably wouldn’t have experienced otherwise.
At the time everyone in the company I worked for used iPhones, so it made sense that I had one too so that I fully understood them and was better able to support my colleagues. Even back in 2016 when Android and iOS still had some notable differences the learning curve was minimal. The only difference I really noticed was that the control that I’d been used to with a rooted android device had been taken away from me and placed back firmly in the hands of Apple. It immediately felt like I didn’t really own the device. Nowadays this has intensified, with Apple intensifying their level of control over your device and Google trying to follow Apple’s trend by taking some of the control away from their Pixel users.
If you hadn’t already guessed I’m a firm advocator for open source software, the right to repair and keeping tech out of landfills by keeping it going for as long as possible and finding new uses for things. This operating system did not sit well with me. I tolerated it because I was given unlimited data and I had no phone bill but I didn’t enjoy it.
The phone itself was fine, battery life was better than the aging HTC One M8 I was coming from and the camera was good too. I couldn’t help but notice just how dull the phone was, it felt corporate.
The iPhone 6 didn’t last long in my possession though. After a night of drinking with friends I got into bed, I sent one last message, squinting through one eye and threw the phone onto my soft chair. Or so I thought I had. When I woke up in the morning it turned out I’d completely missed the chair and thrown the phone at the wall. It didn’t take me long to notice that the phone was now banana shaped. I’d become a victim of the notorious “Bendgate”.
I un-bent the device as best I could and gave it to a new starter, the still slightly bent frame hidden by a protective case. I then took the iPhone 6s that had originally been destined for them!
The HTC One M8 was another one of my few near perfect devices I’ve owned. I loved everything about it for the time I owned it.
The design and build was fantastic. The whole frame was a curved metal with the device being really thin and comfortable to hold yet sturdy. The only trade off to this brilliant design was the omission of a removable battery.
It’s camera setup was controversial at the time, as it only had a 4MP main camera with a 4MP depth sensor. HTC claimed their “Ultra Pixel” technology was the next big thing. I’m not sure about that, but the photos the camera produced were fine and being able to adjust the focus after the shot was taken was a nice feature.
When released this phone shipped with Android 4.4.2, and throughout it’s life got upgraded to Android 6. However the community around this phone was massive. It got official LineageOS support which took it all the way up to Android 10.
Once I’d finished my contract on this phone I moved into the period of combining my work phone and my personal phone (wouldn’t recommend this in any situation, however at the time I was practically forced into it) so didn’t pay for a phone for quite a while after this.
This phone continued it’s life for another few years after my ownership. With LineageOS continuing support for this device it was passed on to my Grandfather, who returned it back to me after his usage. By this point the battery was heavily degraded, and repairs weren’t easy on this device. I flashed the latest version of LineageOS and sold it on the used market. If you look now the HTC One M8 sells for very little money, but going back to around 2020 it still fetched around £100 used!
If you wanted a very cheap device, with lots of extra features and custom ROM support the HTC One M8 was a brilliant option at the time, and would still be a fun device for playing around with today.
Unfortunately HTC as we knew it is long gone, however I just had a look for their website and they currently have just 1 new smartphone for sale. I would love to see them make a comeback, our brand choices for smartphones in 2025 is getting more and more limited. Let’s take a moment for the fallen brands; Nokia, Blackberry, LG, Siemens, NEC, BenQ, Palm, Sagem and of course HTC.
The Galaxy S3 was a device of quite a few “firsts” for me. It was the first device I ever got on a contract, being an expensive device and being on a low wage in my first job in 2012 I would’ve struggled to buy it outright. It was also the first flagship phone I ever owned, a trend that carried on from this uninterrupted for almost a decade.
Functionally it was another big leap from the Galaxy Y and although that was only a budget device the technological leap between two devices released only a year apart was huge.
This phone had a beautiful high resolution, AMOLED screen that still looks great to this day (I own this device again so I can still see it!). The screen and overall device was much bigger than the 3 inch device I was coming from, and yet it was still slimmer.
I consider devices from this time period up until around 2019 a golden era for Smartphones. Manufacturers were cramming everything they could into their phones, and trying new features in every generation. They couldn’t yet rely on their brand name and image alone yet so they actually had to put some effort in. We still had removable batteries, we had headphone jacks and SD card slots and still managed to have sleek devices.
This was around the time I discovered how Samsung short change their European customers. Apart from a couple of exceptions (2023 and 2025) customers in Europe, and most locations outside of the US get devices with Samsung’s in house “Exynos” chipsets. They use these chipsets in all of their products from smart TV’s to their Fridges. This maximises profit margins for them as they don’t have to pay out to Qualcomm or Mediatek. This would be acceptable if it weren’t for the fact the US customers get a better deal. They get Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipsets in all of their S series devices. Not only are the Exynos chipsets inferior (with notorious poor performance, overheating and worse battery life), developers only really focus on the Snapdragon versions of the phone. As someone who was still really keen on custom ROMs and customisation this was extremely disheartening to discover after I’d made my purchase. I could see hundreds of fantastic ROMs available but they weren’t compatible with my device. I am quite vocal about my disdain for this practice and after having suffered these devices a couple more times leading up to the current day I’ve vowed never to buy Samsung again. However that’s a story for another day.
Other than that I owned this device for nearly the entirety of the 2 year contract. I was very happy with it for the most part. The camera took great photos, I no longer had storage and limited RAM issues and the phone just worked. I liked it that much I even bought one of those bulky Otterbox cases to keep it safe. Battery life was still an issue on phones like this though, and at only 2600Mah capacity with an Exynos chipset draining it things were never great. I had an extended battery for this phone, with a bulkier back cover that remedied the issue. However it meant I couldn’t use a protective case as none would fit.
At some point I dropped the phone and cracked the screen. It was a small singular line and nowadays I’d probably just leave it be until it got to the point I couldn’t avoid repairing it. At the time though I was a fresh faced young man just getting my feet into the IT industry. Being naive and overly keen I decided I could get away with just replacing the glass (Even today I wouldn’t attempt a repair like this, with much more knowledge and equipment). Armed with a replacement top layer glass piece, some UV resin and a pen knife I attempted the repair (this feels ridiculous even typing it 13 years later). Needless to say I never got as far as even getting the old glass off before I’d caused irreparable damage.
The S3 met it’s untimely demise at my hands, and that meant it was time for a new phone!
I don’t remember what lead me to purchase this phone, whether anything went wrong with the Chat 335 or if I just fancied something new. But this would’ve been the 2nd big jump in mobile technology I’d experienced. The first being the Nokia 3210 to the Nokia 3200.
I now had an Android device, albeit a very basic, budget one but I had proper connectivity, access to the “Market” which would later become the play store and the customisation options that come with the Android operating system.
I owned this device whilst I was completing my IT apprenticeship after college, and at the time I had a particularly annoying commute between home and the apprenticeship centre. It involved a 10 minute walk, a 30 minute train and another 20 minute walk. On the way there this was manageable and took an hour but on the way home the time we finished for the day and the train times didn’t coincide, so I’d often be left waiting at the train station for 40 minutes to an hour. I’d charge up the phone before I left and then play games on it solidly through my wait and train journey. On a bad day the battery would be flat before I got home. I still have memories of playing “Dragon! Fly” and early builds of “Hill Climb Racing” on this little thing. While this phone was no powerhouse when it came to specs it worked OK, the capacitive touch screen, while still plastic was responsive to input rather than the resistive hell of the Tocco Lite. I certainly used it to its limits and beyond.
Strangely I remember this being the first phone I ever purchased a case for. I had recently joined eBay and found a cheap, red silicone case for it. I don’t recall too many other people using cases around this time but I remember thinking it needed some protection. Most likely because of the dreadful wage we were given on our apprenticeship I’d have had no chance of affording a replacement!
This is another phone I’ve re-purchased since it’s practically worthless now and it just reiterates to me how far technology has come in the 14 years after this device’s release. This phone has a single core 830mhz processor, 384MB RAM and a measly 512MB of internal storage (Thankfully it had a Micro SD card slot and I remember rooting this device to be able to install apps on the SD card). It has a 3 inch screen with a 320×240 resolution. The last Android version it officially received was 2.3.6. We now have phones with 10 times the resolution, 2000 times the storage and more processing power and RAM than the best gaming machines and servers of the time. However all this has come at a cost. This phone has a removable battery, expandable storage and a headphone jack. None of which is commonplace today. Testament to the build quality of these devices this one still holds a charge on it’s original battery, and if I put a SIM card in it can still connect to the network and use mobile data, it connects to my modern WiFi. Obviously not much else works, the web browser is too outdated to load anything other than Google, it can’t connect to the app store and I can’t sign into my accounts. These are all software limitations though. This device still functions just as well as it did when it was new, and had it’s OS updates not been abandoned and API levels of apps not been increased this would still be a functional (although limited and slow) device today.
Considering this was my first true smartphone it didn’t take long before I started to tinker. It spent a year as my primary device where aside from rooting to uninstall some unneeded software and transfer apps to the SD card it was left untouched. Once I no longer relied on it as I phone I began learning about custom ROMs, installing Cyanogenmod and various other ROMS I could find. I began tweaking the Android operating system to slim it down as much as I could to ease the pressure on its limited resources.
The last duties I remember this phone having were as a seed box for torrents. It had files stored on the SD card, living permanently on charge connected to WiFi. It managed this quite well, often going weeks or months with no interaction from me. I’m not sure what happened to the little Galaxy Y after that, being so small maybe it was lost! I’m glad to have another in my nostalgic collection, even if it was basic and underpowered even for it’s time it will always be my first smartphone.
Look at the specifications of any midrange or flagship smartphone today and I can guarantee with a degree of certainty that it will have an OLED screen. Look at the budget segment of the smartphone market and all but a couple of exceptions will have LCD screens. It wouldn’t be a stretch then to assume that an OLED is the premium option, which it is but would it also be correct to assume it’s the better option? Lets delve in.
OLED benefits
An OLED (or Organic Light Emitting Diode) screen is the newer technology that many of today’s more premium phones are equipped with. They have unmatched contrast, in part due to the design of these screens in that there is no backlight, each pixel is individually lit and can be turned off entirely to create a much darker black. They consume less power, again due to the individual LED’s being able to turn off (a big driving factor for “Dark mode”). They have excellent colour accuracy. They can have very fast response times due to the speed the LED’s can change state. OLED screens can be flexible, create the market of folding smartphones we’ve seen over the last few years.
OLED Drawbacks
The cost to produce an OLED panel is high, due to the organic compounds in the OLED’s having a short shelf life and a complex manufacturing process. Over extended use the OLED’s luminance, or ability to produce light decreases. This leads to a problem we refer to as “Burn in”. When these OLED panels display a static image for extended period of time they get dimmer, whilst the other OLED’s around it that were not left in that state keep their brightness, leading to a shadow of the image being permanently on the panel. On phones this commonly occurs on the status bar, or home screen. PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) is the method in which an OLED panel controls its brightness. An OLED is either in an on or off state, there is no in between. Therefore to appear dimmer the OLED will turn on and off hundreds of times a second to trick our brains into seeing a less bright image. Some people can perceive this flicker and it causes them headaches and eye strain in a term that’s now commonly referred to as “PWM Sensitivity”. Durability is also a concern with OLED panels, depending on the quality used they can be quite susceptible to impact damage and deterioration over time.
LCD Benefits
An LCD (or Liquid Crystal Display) is a more mature technology used in everything from digital watches and train departure boards to TV’s, computer monitors and mobile phones. It’s more complex in how it works compared to OLED with it’s RGB LED’s, but essentially there is a backlight which shines through colour filters to create an image. They are cheaper to manufacture because the manufacturing process is simpler and uses readily available materials. They are not susceptible to burn in. They do not have issues with PWM due to the fact the backlight brightness can be directly adjusted by simply lowering or increasing the voltage. LCD’s can achieve a higher peak brightness due to the backlight technology. LCD panels also generally have a very long lifespan.
LCD Drawbacks
On higher brightness settings LCD panels can draw a lot of power due to the backlight. Also due to the backlight the contrast between black and white is limited, this varies by quality of the LCD used. LCD’s can also have poor response times, again this varies by quality of panel and isn’t as prominent in modern LCD displays but essentially the light filters cannot respond fast enough to the input they receive and a “ghost” image can be displayed for a fraction of a second but enough to be perceivable.
Which is best for a smartphone then?
That was a lot of information, but its important when making a comparison to have all the facts. How do we go about comparing both of these technologies just for the application in a smartphone? We have to bring real use cases and user requirements into it. We also have to appreciate that not all LCD and OLED panels are created equal. There is a vast difference in quality between the best and worse panels for each of these technologies.
There are extreme ends of the user spectrum here for which the decision will be very easy: For a user with PWM sensitivity, or someone who needs to display static images for an extended of period of time they need a phone with an LCD screen. For a user playing high intensity games, or a professional photographer demanding colour accuracy they need an OLED screen.
A couple of niche features OLED panels can provide may also sway your decision too. If you need an always on display or want the deepest blacks when using dark mode, only an OLED can provide that.
Personally I fall into the category of LCD being a better choice for me. While I don’t get headaches or eye strain from an OLED screen I can detect the flicker, especially in my peripheral vision which can get annoying. I also keep my screen timeout set at 10 minutes, and often display text or an image for reference while I’m working on something, so not having to worry about burn in is a plus. I also appreciate the lower cost, my current personal phone (HMD Pulse) cost me just £60 new and sealed, whereas my work phone (CMF Phone 1) cost £165, and aside from the OLED and faster chipset it’s missing features that the HMD Pulse has. The cost of replacement is also a benefit to me too, it’s reassuring to know that if I break the screen I can replace it for £15 delivered whereas on some of the premium flagship phones a replacement OLED panel can be £200-300 just for the part, considering most users can’t fit a screen themselves it becomes worryingly expensive.
What should the average user do then? Assuming you don’t have any of the specific requirements I’ve mentioned above. In reality you don’t have much choice. In today’s market as I mentioned in the first paragraph budget phones get LCD panels and more expensive phones get an OLED panel. Unfortunately it seems this trend is only increasing and in some cases budget phones such as the CMF Phone 1 and Samsung A15 and A16 have now got OLED screens.
In an ideal world I’d like to see customers presented with a choice: The same phone with the only difference being a choice of an LCD or an OLED. Even more optimistically the LCD variant would be slightly cheaper too, passing on the reduced manufacturing cost. An LCD is arguably the best choice for most people, and the environment. It only takes a quick search on 2nd hand online marketplaces to see thousands of phones being sold as spares and repairs due to OLED burn in and broken panels.
How many of these phones would still be in use if they didn’t have this fault, and if when broken the screen could have been replaced cheaply? In a room of average people none of them would be able to discern or tell you the difference between a quality LCD and an OLED, it seems like the ingenious marketing departments of the smartphone companies have struck again.
Below I’ve taken two photos of four phones displaying the same image at maximum brightness.
From left to right we have a Samsung Galaxy Y (2011, TFT LCD), HMD Pulse (2024, IPS LCD), Samsung Galaxy S3 (2012, Super AMOLED), CMF Phone 1 (2024, AMOLED).
As you can see there are differences here, and in particular the older devices have lower max brightness levels. However even in the case of the 2011 Galaxy Y other than its miniscule size you can’t look at the display and say it looks awful. On the newer phones the bezels are smaller and the screens are much bigger but the difference between the two is marginal and these two aren’t even close to being equal. The Pulse has a PPI (Pixels per inch) of 265, whereas the CMF Phone 1 has 395.
What I’m getting at here is that specs on paper can look like a night and day difference but in reality the differences are barely noticeable. Buy what works for you best and don’t get sucked into marketing tactics!
There was actually another device in-between this one and the Tocco Lite. It was a Nokia X3-02, and on paper it should’ve been better than this one. However there was a problem with it not being able to connect to WiFi and another issue I can’t remember that meant it had to be returned, because I only had it for around a week I’m not going to do a full post for it.
Onto the Samsung S3350 AKA Chat 335. I used this phone throughout my time at College. Aside from the key feature that it was actually possible to type on unlike the Tocco Lite this had one notable, major improvement on it. WiFi. No longer was I limited by my minimal credit, when I was somewhere with WiFi (admittedly not too many public places had this yet) I could browse Facebook or the web.
You only need to take one look at the picture above to see that this phone is a blatant Blackberry knock off. 2010 was a strange time for the mobile phone market. On one hand you had the iPhone 4, the Galaxy S and the Nexus One whilst on the other hand Blackberry still had a large market share and people were still buying feature phones like the Chat 335 and Nokia devices running Symbian. We were not yet in a world where a smartphone was a requirement, mobile banking wasn’t an option, mobile data prices were still high and the height of portability for me was a laptop. For one I wouldn’t have been able to afford a smartphone and it simply wasn’t a requirement for me.
This phone was still annoying enough that you wouldn’t want to use it unless you really needed to. I think I may have used the inbuilt internet browser a couple of times, and most of the time you were met with the dreaded “Out of memory” message when trying to load a page. It did however have a micro SD card slot and a 3.5mm headphone jack so it got plenty of use as a media device. I also got quite good at texting with the full keyboard, although I remember occasionally using my girlfriend at the time’s Blackberry and that was worlds ahead of the Chat 335 in terms of quality and functionality.
Without any comparison this was a decidedly budget and basic device. I actually recently re-purchased this device to revisit so I can review it without memories clouding my judgement. It has a capacitive home button, which allows you to scroll around the menus. This is overly sensitive and doesn’t work well at all. The keyboard often doesn’t register a button press, which compounds the issue with the inaccurate scrolling button when you try to correct it. It lacks a reasonable amount of RAM to load any website beyond Google. The camera was poor, even for the time. On the flip side, just using it as a feature phone and not expecting it to be a smartphone it’s OK. The keyboard is still better than the best T9 keyboard, or a resistive touch screen. Despite being small the display is clear and readable. The battery lasts a long time and the device is very durable.
While this phone would never have won any awards even back in 2010 it was an acceptable device. It kept me in contact with friends and family, and kept me occupied through moments of boredom. This was my last feature phone before I moved onto a smartphone! Aside from where I’ve done digital detoxes and used a “Dumbphone” from here on out it’s all Android and iOS devices from here on.
This was my first phone that had a touch screen, and it was purchased as a replacement to the W300i.
This phone was my introduction to Samsung devices and it runs TouchWiz 1.0. This was the basis of One UI which is now on version 7 on Android 15. Technically this is where it all began. Launched in 2009 this phone was a budget phone, on a proprietary operating system. It has a resistive touch screen and no physical keyboard. In some ways it looks very familiar to the smartphones we know. However don’t be fooled, this is very much a feature phone with a touch screen. The operating system was very limited, with no method to install any apps other than what it shipped with. You could however set up your homescreen with widgets for the first time, although it’s uses were limited.
My only real fond memory of this phone was the camera and MP3 player. There was still no 3.5mm headphone jack to be seen on this device, but it had the option to expand the storage with a Micro SD card, offering at the time seemingly limitless storage. The camera was much better than the VGA camera I was used to on the W300i, and to this day I still have some memories from around 2010 in photo and video form taken on this camera.
That’s where the good part ends. The touch screen on this phone was a nightmare to use. Being resistive stacked the odds against it but having parts of the user interface requiring you to press and drag (scrolling) was just a recipe for disaster. You would often accidentally click into menus and accidentally call the wrong person, it was haphazard at best. Typing was no better, in portrait orientation the phone would display a T9 keyboard and you had to orient the phone in landscape to get a full QWERTY layout. Neither were fast or accurate and I would often resort to a phone call instead just to avoid having to endure it. The fact that my next device was a phone with a full QWERTY, physical keyboard should speak volumes about my experience with this.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) the device was not durable at all. As a teenager, doing things that normal teenagers do this device didn’t last long at all. When dropped the back cover and battery had a habit of ejecting themselves from the phone, and the soft resistive touch screen wasn’t up to much abuse. I can’t remember the incident that caused it’s untimely demise but it isn’t hard to imagine.
