Last week, I headed out to the Apple Store to purchase the mophie juice pack air to give my phone significantly more battery than my iPhone 3Gs offers up. The mophie products had come highly recommended by iJustine when I’d had a conversation with her earlier this year in LA, and a few others have chimed in with similar thoughts on the subject.
But after picking it up, I noticed that the size and heft of my iPhone wearing the juice pack air had a similar resemblance to something else I once owned — my first cellphone, back in 1998. That phone, which ran on the Cellular One network in central New Jersey, was the Philips Spark. The Spark was about 5″ tall by 2.2″ wide by .9″ deep. My iPhone 3Gs is now 4.9″ x 2.59″ x .75″. Amusingly, the Spark, which I thought was mega heavy at the time, weighed 129 grams, or about 4.55 ounces. My 3Gs, without the mophie, weighs about 4.76 ounces, and with it weighs about 7.42 ounces. Back in ‘98, I was pulling in 6 hours of talk time and 350 hours of standby on the standard GSM network, as opposed to 5 hours of talk time on the 3G and 300 hours of standby, or somewhere around 7-9 of talk time with the mophie.
WTF.
Now don’t get me wrong, I LOVE my iPhone and wouldn’t trade it in for anything at this point, but at the time, I had friends ragging the hell out of me for choosing that as my first phone. I had no problem with its heft or size – I actually liked it more that way. Soon after, I traded up for various Nokia, Motorola, or Samsung models, which got progressively smaller as time went on. But here I am, 11 years later, having spent the last two years rocking the iPhone, which absolutely slays the technology in my first phone, and obviously wins on form factor, but still takes up the same space in my pocket. Oh, and I’m paying A LOT more out of pocket to use it, and it’s become a part of my existence in some ways — as opposed to something that was helpful to have but wasn’t exactly getting abused, considering what it cost to have minutes every month.
So I guess the question is, where are priorities right now — size (or is thickness the only real measurement of importance?), cost, or straight up abilities that your phone offers? Should I be surprised that one of the parts of the phone decision-making process has come full circle, and that Apple and others aren’t worried a lick about it? What about you? What kind of cellphones did you start off with?