#oh and mum had a matching pig plushy cover on her phone

[milly-grace]

I had a Nokia brick phone at 11 (travelled from outer suburbs to cbd from yr7-yr10 in early 00s so my parents wanted me to be safe on the train)

Changed to a second hand Motorola in yr9 that was still a brick shape but smaller and fancier (killed it with salad dressing cos it had over sensitive buttons so I kept it in my lunch box and the dressing container broke one day, it softly vibrated for ages then died)

Then I had a brand new flip phone that lasted til yr11 (I had a bad habit of using the charm string to spin it on my finger and it eventually went flying one time too many)

I had a few different second hand phones from my parents between then and the end of university.

And then I got a Samsung Galaxy s4 mini that I used for many many years til it died and I got my dad's old Samsung Galaxy s4 Note, til again it died after another 4 years of use, and now I have my current cheap Samsung Asomething

See the thing is, until my first smart phone all my phones (except the fancy Motorola I have no idea how much my uncle spent) were well under $50 including prepaid credit. My current phone, from the "budget friendly" line, was $120. It makes me more than a little mad that we went from being able to give a kid a $15 phone for emergencies that will take a beating or two before dying, to several hundred for a phone that can't handle wear and tear (not even touching planned obsolescence here).

Like, you should be mad that my poor ass family could buy phones for all six of us in the 00s (and replace as needed) and now in the 20s I spend more on my monthly prepaid credit than my first phone cost.

Also I need people to know that my first flip phone had a plushy monkey phone cover and it was so good and cute and silly and I loved it.

something I’ve seen in various fandoms now is young artists will draw flip phones with cracked screens. But in my experience, I have never met someone whose flip phone had a screen crack. Those screens were more like something on a calculator or a nintendo ds than like a smartphone. I was a klutz, and my first phone broke because the front half and back half came apart. Like you’d mayyyyybe see it on some of the later flip phones that only had large screens on the front because smartphones had already made them popular, but it was still way more rare.

If you wanna give a character a flip phone and show they’re clumsy, they’re more likely to have the paint scratched like hell or parts of the plastic chipped off. No more phone charms because the plastic loop broke. If the screen is broken, it would sooner not turn on anymore before the screen would have a crack in it.