I counted up recently and came to nine phones in just over two decades, starting with a hand-me-down Nokia in 2001 and ending, for now, with an iPhone 14 Pro. That’s not a lot by some people’s standards, but each one is a fairly clear timestamp of where I was at the time, who I was calling, and what I thought technology was supposed to be doing for me. The gap between the first phone on the list and the last is so large it’s almost absurd. So this is that list, in order, with some uncomfortable technical context thrown in.
Nokia 5110 (2001)
My first phone came to me already used. It had belonged to my parents before me, which meant it had already done a few years of service by the time it reached Year 7. The Nokia 5110 launched in 1998 and was, at one point, described as the most popular mobile phone in the world. It was a GSM 900MHz handset with a monochrome 84×48 pixel LCD display, a replaceable Xpress-On cover, and a battery that ran for days. It also weighed 170 grams, which sounded normal at the time.
The external antenna was a regular presence in my pocket and not always a comfortable one. It was pointed at the best of times. Later at university, when I came back to the 5110 after a newer phone gave up on me, the plastic cap that softened the tip had gone missing, which made things worse. The fact that I could return to a phone that was three years out of production and have it work without complaint says something about the build quality. Nokia made things that lasted.
I was put on Optus when I got the phone, which didn’t matter much in the first couple of years of high school because I had no money to call anyone and text messages cost up to 25 cents each. That changed around Year 9 when Optus ran a promotion offering free calls between Optus customers for 20 minutes at a time after 8pm. Most of my friends were on Optus, so we all developed a routine of calling each other, watching the clock, hanging up at 19 minutes, and immediately calling back. This went on for months. Telcos have been my adversaries ever since.
The only game I remember on it was Snake, which Nokia introduced on this very model. You moved a growing line around a screen eating dots and trying not to hit yourself. Millions of people played it obsessively. Worth bearing in mind the next time someone tells you there was nothing to do before smartphones.
Nokia 3200 (Late 2003 / Early 2004)
My first brand new phone, chosen entirely by me, which meant I had no one to blame for its shortcomings.
The Nokia 3200 was a youth-oriented handset released in late 2003. It had a 128×128 pixel colour screen showing 4,096 colours, a 0.1-megapixel CIF camera shooting at 352×288 pixels, a torch, FM radio, Java game support, and 1MB of shared memory. The camera produced photos roughly thumbnail size. Getting them off the phone and onto a computer was technically possible without using a third-party website, which put the 3200 ahead of some competitors. That is genuinely the bar I am describing.
Its defining feature was a cutting stencil that let you create paper cut-outs to slip behind the translucent case, so you could put any image you liked on the front and back of the phone. Nokia marketed this at teenagers who wanted personalisation without buying a new handset every few months.
I put a photo of Marilyn Manson on mine. On both sides. I never changed it once in the time I owned the phone. I thought it looked excellent and I stand by that.
The 3200 also gave me my first experience with polyphonic ringtones. Previous phones could only play single-note monophonic tones, which sounded like electronic chirping. Polyphonic ringtones played multiple simultaneous notes, which meant they could actually sound like music. The 3200 supported up to 40 simultaneous voices. The problem was that downloading a polyphonic ringtone cost money, so instead I recorded a MIDI version of M+Ms by Blink-182 directly onto the handset. MIDI files are note-based and tell a synthesiser what to play, so it produced something that sounded like a polyphonic ringtone rather than a real song playback. I could easily have just recorded the actual song. I did not want that. I wanted it to sound like a ringtone, so a ringtone it would be.
That recording used a meaningful portion of the 1MB of available memory. I also played the built-in Bounce platformer game and downloaded a Street Fighter game that was essentially unplayable at any level.
Nokia 6500 Slide (Around 2007)
My third phone was a Nokia slide phone from around 2007. At the time I wasn’t entirely sure if it was a 6300 or a 6500, but the slider form factor makes it almost certainly the 6500 Slide, which Nokia released in September of that year. The 6300 was a bar-shaped candybar phone; the 6500 Slide is the one with the mechanism.
It was genuinely good hardware for a mid-range phone of that era. Brushed stainless steel casing, a 2.2-inch TFT display showing 16 million colours at 240×320 pixels, a 3.2-megapixel autofocus camera with Carl Zeiss optics and 8x digital zoom, 3G connectivity, TV-out, Bluetooth 2.0, and a microSD card slot expandable to 4GB. Running Nokia’s S40 fifth edition firmware, it felt like a substantial step up from everything I’d used before.
It came new, which should have meant no surprises. However, the memory card it shipped with already had photos of a stranger on it. The man appeared to be fine. Still odd.
The camera was legitimately usable. Photos looked like photos rather than coloured noise. Getting images off the phone was straightforward. I kept it in a clear plastic case and it absorbed a fair amount of punishment.
The slider mechanism was its eventual undoing. After enough use, the hinge lost tension and the phone stopped sliding cleanly. Rather than replace it, I went back to the old 5110 for a while, which told me something about what I valued in a phone at that point: reliability over sophistication. The 5110, built like a small brick and carrying no mechanical complexity, was still functioning without complaint.
iPhone 3GS (2009)
I moved to the iPhone 3GS in 2009, during my last year of university. The 3GS was Apple’s third-generation iPhone, with the “S” standing for Speed. It ran an ARM Cortex-A8 processor at 600MHz, had 256MB of RAM, a 3.5-inch 480×320 touchscreen, a 3.15-megapixel autofocus camera with basic 480p video recording, and 7.2Mbps HSDPA. It launched in Australia in June 2009 and was, crucially, the first phone I’d owned that was actually designed around internet use.
I was still on Optus when I got it and the 3G internet barely worked where I was living. Switched to Telstra for the coverage. It cost more and I resented it, but it was the only network where the mobile internet actually functioned reliably at the time.
Mobile data in that era came with a particular anxiety that is genuinely hard to explain to anyone who started using smartphones more recently. Australian carriers were remarkably opaque about how much data you had consumed at any given point in the billing cycle. You would get a bill and find out after the fact that you had blown past your cap and accrued excess charges. There was no easy way to check mid-month without logging into a website designed to make the process as difficult as possible. A friend of mine, Matt Beshara, built some of the first iOS apps that solved this directly. They authenticated against the major Australian carriers’ accounts and gave you a visual breakdown of how much data you had used relative to where you were in the month. Simple idea, genuinely useful, and something that should have existed from day one. Now carriers hand out data in such generous quantities that most people never think about it, but for several years it was a real source of stress for anyone who used their phone for anything beyond text messages.
The move from a Nokia feature phone to a smartphone was not incremental. The App Store, the full browser, the multi-touch display that actually tracked your fingers accurately, the ability to have email that worked properly. It was a different product category wearing the name “phone”. Within a week the Nokia felt like something from another era. Which, by that point, it was.
This was also where social media shifted from something you checked on a desktop to something that lived in your pocket. The Facebook app had launched for iPhone in July 2008, and by the time I had the 3GS it was fully entrenched as the default way to know what people you’d gone to school with were doing. Twitter had an app too. Both were still relatively straightforward at this point, before the algorithmic feeds and engagement optimisation that would come later. Instagram launched in October 2010, iOS-only and free, and I was on it early. It hit a million users within two months of launch and grew faster than almost anything before it. In those first couple of years it was genuinely good: chronological feed, no ads, no Reels, no shopping tabs. Just photos.
The App Store in 2009 was also in a strange transitional moment. Alongside the legitimate software there was a wave of demake games: cut-down mobile versions of major console franchises rebuilt from scratch for a touchscreen. These weren’t ports. They were simplified reimaginings with reduced polygon counts, streamlined controls, and gameplay stripped back to work without physical buttons. Some went further and converted action games into rail shooters, where the game moved you through the level automatically and you just aimed and fired. Doom 4, Resident Evil 4, and a handful of others got this treatment. The results varied from surprisingly playable to barely recognisable, but they existed, and they were the only way to have anything resembling those games in your pocket at the time. Many are no longer available anywhere. I still have my old iPhones with those apps on them, which is the only way to access most of them now. A lot of mobile gaming history from that era quietly vanished as the platform moved on and developers stopped maintaining titles that no longer made commercial sense to keep alive.
One physical complaint about the 3GS: the rounded plastic back meant the phone couldn’t stand up on a flat surface. You’d put it down and it would just roll. A minor thing, but it mattered enough that I noticed it every time.
iPhone 4S (2011)
Before getting to the 4S, a word on the iPhone 4 that preceded it: I liked the look of it. The flat stainless steel edges and straight sides felt properly considered in a way the rounded back of the 3GS hadn’t. That said, the decision to use glass on the back struck me at the time as a genuinely puzzling choice for a device you carry everywhere. Glass on both sides sounds like a product that’s been designed to maximise repair revenue rather than durability. Apple eventually proved that modern glass can take a hit, but the 4’s rear panel didn’t exactly inspire confidence.
The iPhone 4S arrived in October 2011 as Apple’s fifth-generation iPhone, and its headline feature was Siri: a voice-activated assistant that let you interact with your phone using natural language. You could set reminders, send messages, ask questions, and make calls without touching the screen. Apple described it as an “intelligent assistant” and the technology press spent considerable time debating whether that description was accurate.
The honest answer in 2011 was: partially. Siri was impressive in concept and unreliable in practice, frequently mishearing commands, requiring a data connection to function, and handling anything outside a fairly narrow set of tasks with limited success. It was, however, the first time most people had encountered a voice interface that genuinely tried to understand intent rather than just matching keywords. That mattered, even when it got things wrong.
The hardware was a genuine step forward. The dual-core A5 chip delivered roughly twice the CPU performance and seven times the GPU performance of the iPhone 4’s A4. The 8-megapixel camera shot 1080p video and produced noticeably sharper photos. It shipped with iOS 5 and iCloud, which meant your photos, contacts, and backups were no longer living exclusively on one device.
The 4S was the last iPhone to use Apple’s 30-pin dock connector. It was also the last Apple product that Steve Jobs had a role in developing before his death the day after its announcement.
At some point during ownership, the physical Home button started failing. Rather than replace it, I enabled AssistiveTouch, a virtual floating button that overlays on screen and replicates the Home button’s functions. It works, and you get used to it faster than expected, but it is a reminder that mechanical buttons on phones you use constantly are under a lot of stress. Not a great advertisement for putting a critical function on a single moving part.
Snapchat launched in 2011, the same year as the 4S, built around disappearing messages and photos. Instagram was still growing quickly and hadn’t yet been bought by Facebook. These were the years when social media apps still felt like they were being made by people who used them, rather than by people trying to extract maximum time from them.
iPhone 6 (2014)
The iPhone 6 in 2014 was Apple finally acknowledging that people wanted a bigger screen. The 6 had a 4.7-inch Retina HD display at 1334×750 resolution, a rounded aluminium body at 6.9mm thin, an A8 chip, an 8-megapixel camera with phase-detection autofocus, and Apple Pay via NFC. It was also the iPhone that introduced Touch ID to the mainstream line, the fingerprint sensor embedded in the Home button that let you unlock the phone with a thumb.
The screen size jump was more meaningful than it sounds. Reading anything on the display became measurably more comfortable. Touch ID was the other major quality-of-life improvement. Being able to unlock the phone with a thumb press, without having to look at the screen, wake it, swipe, and enter a PIN, sounds like a minor convenience until you’ve used it for a week and then tried to go back. The ability to pick up the phone and have it already unlocked by the time it reaches your face is one of those things you don’t appreciate until it’s gone.
The 6 also became infamous for Bendgate, a widely reported issue where the phone bent under pressure in a back pocket due to its very thin aluminium construction. Apple reinforced subsequent models. The 6 stands as the cautionary example of what happens when thinness becomes the priority over structural rigidity.
The long ownership period also meant this was the phone I had when Pokemon Go launched in Australia in July 2016. The initial frenzy was real. It was the first time a mobile game genuinely got people walking around public spaces staring at their phones with a shared sense of purpose, which felt novel for about a month before it started feeling like a lot of effort. Around the same time, He-Man: Tappers of Grayskull came out, an idle clicker RPG based on the original Masters of the Universe cartoon, complete with the original voice cast. It ran from August 2016 until sometime in 2018 before quietly disappearing, which is the fate of most mobile games that aren’t backed by a company willing to fund indefinite maintenance.
I had this one for a long time. When it was close to two years old, Apple replaced it with a refurbished unit under warranty, which gave it another solid year of life. I’ve had it longer than any other phone on this list by a stretch, which is partly testament to that extended run and partly because I’ve never smashed a phone in my life. Cases help. From the iPhone onwards, I’ve kept every phone in either a LifeProof or OtterBox case, which are genuinely protective rather than the decorative covers most people put on phones to feel like they’re doing something. If you’ve ever dropped a phone without a case and watched the screen shatter on a pavement, you understand the value. None of my phones have ended that way.
By the mid-2010s, the social media landscape had settled into something less interesting than it had been. Facebook had bought Instagram in 2012 for a billion dollars and, over the following years, set about making it more like Facebook. Ads arrived, then the algorithmic feed replaced the chronological one, then Stories appeared as a direct copy of Snapchat’s format. I had been an early Instagram user but by this point I had largely stopped posting. I still have the account. I check it occasionally. But the version of the app that existed in 2011 and the version that exists now are essentially different products with the same name.
iPhone X (2017)
The iPhone X was Apple’s tenth anniversary phone and the most substantive redesign since the original. Released in November 2017, it introduced several things the company had never put in an iPhone before, most of which became standard across the range within a couple of years.
The Home button was gone. In its place, a 5.8-inch edge-to-edge OLED Super Retina display with a sensor notch at the top, running at 2436×1125 pixels and 458 pixels per inch, with support for Dolby Vision and HDR10. Navigation shifted to swipe gestures that took about a week to internalise fully and then became the only logical way to use a phone.
Face ID replaced Touch ID. The TrueDepth camera system mapped your face using infrared sensors and flood illumination, with Apple claiming it was more accurate than fingerprint recognition. It worked well from day one, including in the dark and at various angles, though it was notably less effective with sunglasses.
The OLED screen was a visible improvement over the LCD panels in every earlier iPhone. Blacks were actually black. Contrast was noticeably better. The phone launched in Australia at AU$1,579 for the 64GB model, making it the most expensive iPhone released to that point. It sold out immediately.
The iPhone X also had no headphone jack, which Apple had first removed with the iPhone 7 in 2016. Having skipped the 7 and 8 entirely, this was the first phone I owned without one. I got a pair of AirPods with it and have not used a corded headphone since. I genuinely cannot go back. The absence of a cable while walking, exercising, or just moving around is one of those quality-of-life changes you forget you ever lived without. The original AirPods were not universally loved at launch, but the concept was right from day one.
The X was also the phone I was on when The Walking Dead: Our World launched in July 2018. It was an AR and location-based game, similar in concept to Pokemon Go but with considerably more going on: a light-gun shooter structure where you cleared walkers from real-world locations, with a range of characters and weapons that each had distinct abilities. I preferred it to Pokemon Go by a fair margin. It had more mechanical depth and the shooter format suited the phone touchscreen better than the capture-and-collect loop. This one would end up following me across multiple phones.
TikTok went international in 2017 and started gaining serious traction in Australia around this time after ByteDance merged it with Musical.ly in 2018. I was aware of it. I did not participate.
iPhone 12 Pro (2020)
The iPhone 12 Pro in late 2020 brought several notable changes. It was Apple’s first iPhone range with 5G support. The 12 Pro specifically added a third camera, a LiDAR scanner for faster autofocus in low light and improved augmented reality, and a ProRAW shooting format for more editing flexibility. It was also the first generation to put OLED screens across all models, not just the Pro variants. And it revived MagSafe, the magnetic charging connector previously found on MacBook power adapters, reborn as a wireless charging and accessory attachment system built into the back of the phone.
The design returned to flat aluminium sides, a callback to the iPhone 4 and 5 era that turned out to age very well. The A14 Bionic chip was the first smartphone chip built on a 5-nanometer process, with Apple claiming a 50 percent CPU and GPU advantage over competing chips. The Ceramic Shield front glass, developed with Corning, improved drop resistance. IP68 water resistance meant submersion to six metres for 30 minutes.
Apple also removed the charger from the box, which generated the predictable complaints. The environmental justification was real enough, but it was also convenient for a company that sells chargers.
The 12 Pro’s era coincided with TikTok’s breakout moment. Lockdowns in 2020 drove an enormous amount of people onto the platform and it overtook Instagram as the default destination for short-form content, particularly for anyone under 30. For those of us who had already lost interest in social media before it arrived, it was easy enough to observe from a distance.
Storage is something I think about less with every phone. Early iPhones required careful management of what you kept on the device. These days, photos back up to iCloud automatically and I run far fewer apps than I used to, so the base storage tier does everything I actually need. The idea of filling a phone now feels genuinely difficult.
The Walking Dead: Our World was still running during the 12 Pro’s time in my pocket, though not for much longer. It shut down on 31 January 2023, which ended a consistent multi-year run across three different phones. It was one of the few mobile games I had played with any real regularity over an extended period, which probably says something about how well the format held up relative to most of what the App Store produces.
iPhone 14 Pro (2022)
The iPhone 14 Pro arrived in September 2022 with the Dynamic Island: a software-hardware hybrid that turned the front camera cutout into an interactive display element that expands and contracts depending on what’s happening on the phone. Navigation, timers, music controls, Face ID animations, all routed through the same space. It sounds gimmicky until you’ve used it for a week and stopped treating it as a separate thing.
The main camera jumped from 12 to 48 megapixels, the largest single leap in iPhone camera resolution since the platform launched. In practice this meant the sensor captured significantly more data per shot, with better low-light performance and more flexibility when editing. The Always-On display, the first ever on an iPhone, kept the lock screen visible at reduced brightness around the clock without the battery impact you’d expect.
The A16 Bionic ran on a 4-nanometer process. Emergency SOS via satellite let you send distress signals without mobile or Wi-Fi coverage. Crash Detection could automatically contact emergency services if the phone detected an impact consistent with a car accident.
I’m still on the 14 Pro from the office in South Melbourne. I charge it exclusively via MagSafe rather than plugging anything into the Lightning port. The OtterBox has a waterproof cover over the charging port and there’s not much point repeatedly opening it when the magnetic charger sits on the back. Small thing, but it is the kind of detail that makes a difference when you are trying to keep a phone in good condition over the long term.
The social media picture by 2022 was fairly grim. Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk and rebranded as X, shedding a large portion of its user base in the process. Instagram had become indistinguishable from a shopping catalogue. Facebook remained enormous and continued to be used primarily by people sending each other news articles they hadn’t read. TikTok was everywhere. I use LinkedIn for work and check a handful of things occasionally, which about sums up where a decade and a half of social media enthusiasm landed.
The current game of choice is Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket, which launched in October 2024. It is exactly what it sounds like: a mobile version of the physical card game, with two free booster packs available daily and a streamlined battle mode. Having grown up with the original cards, there is something satisfying about a game built entirely around opening packs and building a collection without needing a physical storage solution. It is also, notably, still available to download, which puts it ahead of most of the games mentioned in this article.
Going from 1MB of shared memory and a pixelated monochrome screen to a 48-megapixel camera and satellite emergency calling in the span of about 20 years is a fairly extraordinary run of progress. Whether it has actually made any of those phone calls less annoying is a separate question.
What Comes Next: iPhone 18 Pro
The next phone on the list will be the iPhone 18 Pro, expected to launch in September 2026 alongside the Pro Max and Apple’s first foldable iPhone. It will be my first USB-C iPhone, which sounds like a minor thing until you consider that I’ve been on Lightning since 2012. Apple switched the iPhone to USB-C with the iPhone 15 in 2023, meaning I’ve now sat through three generations of USB-C iPhones while still using a proprietary cable that the rest of the device ecosystem abandoned years ago.
The rumoured spec sheet is reasonable rather than transformative. The A20 chip on a 2-nanometer process should deliver meaningful efficiency gains. The Dynamic Island is expected to shrink further as Face ID components move partially under the display. A variable aperture on the main camera is among the more interesting rumours, which would give the lens more control over depth of field in a way that fixed-aperture smartphone cameras can’t currently match. Colour options reportedly include Dark Cherry, Light Blue, Dark Gray, and Silver, a departure from the current lineup.
It will be phone number ten. A round number, by coincidence, that started with a hand-me-down Nokia in 2001 and ends, for now, with whatever Apple announces in a few months.
What My Kids Will Get
I have two young boys currently in childcare, which puts the first phone conversation a few years away but not as far as it feels. The question of what phone to give them first is one I think about more than I expected to.
The obvious answer would be to hand down an old iPhone when the time comes. I have several of them, all in working condition, all in good shape thanks to the case habit. The problem is that they’re not really suitable for hand-me-downs in the way old Nokias were. Those old iPhones have apps and games on them that no longer exist on the App Store, the demakes, the Walking Dead, things that disappeared years ago and can’t be reinstalled. Handing one of them to a child would mean giving them a device they can’t properly manage or update, running software that can’t be replaced if something goes wrong. They’re better kept as they are.
So the hand-me-down path doesn’t really work. Which means starting fresh, and the more interesting question is whether that means a smartphone at all.
There’s a growing market for phones built specifically around the idea that children shouldn’t have smartphones yet. The Tin Can is one of the more interesting examples: a Wi-Fi landline-style device that runs on a private network, lets kids call only parent-approved contacts, and offers nothing else. No apps, no texting, no social media, no YouTube. Just voice calls. It launched in the US and Canada and has already sold hundreds of thousands of units, with Australian families now able to get hold of them. It arrived at exactly the moment parents started paying serious attention to what smartphones were doing to children’s attention and social development.
Waffle phone for kids is a similar product aimed at slightly younger children: screen-free, app-free, with calls limited to a parent-controlled list of contacts. It is due to ship in October 2026.
Both products are, in a sense, simpler than anything in this article. The Nokia 5110 at least had Snake. These devices are built specifically to have nothing on them that isn’t a phone call, which is a deliberate choice in an era when every other device is optimised to do the opposite. Whether my kids end up with something like this or go straight to a managed smartphone with tight parental controls, the conversation will be different from the one my parents had in 2001 when they handed me a secondhand Nokia and told me to use it if I got stuck at the bus stop. The stakes feel higher now, and I think most parents would agree that’s not just anxiety talking.