Well, if you have a GSM SIM (that's active) and you are able to survive without being constantly connected at GPRS/EDGE or UMTS speeds...well...I've got some cool old tech for you! Sure you won't be able to get MMS messages, and you won't be able to receive email as fast as you can with your ultra modern blackberry, but your berry has nothing on these following devices of yesteryear when it comes to retro coolness. What's best, even though they are old by technology standards, if you just pop your SIM in, they work!


Nokia 9000i: The Nokia 9000i was the first of the Communicator line of smartphones that Nokia made. It is now a ten-year old machine, having been released in 1998. With a whoping 24Mhz 386 Intel chip and 8MB or memory, this beast of a machine ran GEOS 3.0 It has an HTML browser, email and Fax capabilities, on top of standard SMS. This retrocool toy surfs the net at a blazing 9.6kbps over CSD. It comes with full PIM, telnet, and a terminal application
The North American version (9000il) is GSM 1900, and the European version is GSM 900. Fun fact: it was used in the movie the saint, its over 300 grams (!), and of course sports a cool monochrome display. All subsequent models of the 9xxx series used Symbian with the Series80 User Interface.

Ericsson R380w: Circa 2000, this world phone (GSM 900/1900), nay, world communicator, gives you a nice touch screen with a flip down numeric key pad (sort of like later UIQ phones), you can surf the world of WAP sites at blazing CSD speeds, you can read/send email, and of course send and receive SMS. It runs on EPOC, and of course sports the obligatory Infrared port. Size-wize, it is about half the size of the Nokia 9000i. This was Ericsson's first, and last, smartphone before going into the Symbian UIQ market as SonyEricsson.

Tags: retro, smartphone, Nokia, ericsson, psion

When I was a MacOS 9 user, I really did not pay much attention to uptime. When I left home, I turned the machine off, when I was home, it was on. I never had the need to turn the computer off in order to perform system cleanup as a regular task. When MacOS X came out, 'uptime' was all the rage on the forums that I frequented. People just jumped into the Terminal application and with the uptime command they could see how long their Mac was running without a shut down. Various forum members thus had contests to see how long their Mac worked without a reboot (or a Kernel Panic). This is where I entered the uptime craze.

When I got my powerbook - the same one that isn't functioning properly today - I kept it running for a long long time without reboot. I think my personal record was three or four months without a reboot. All this time, I did not really have any performance problems because I think that the cleanup processes were happening automatically. I later got some utilities to run the cleanup processes on demand, but that is another matter.

Anyway, since my Mac started not working properly, I generally turned it on when I needed to do some work, like type a paper, input data in an excel sheet, surf the net, and so on. About ten days ago I got lazy. I did not turn my computer off, I just put it to sleep. Today it started being slow and it took quite some time to switch applications and move from tab to tab in my browser. I decided to restart my Mac to clean it up, but before doing so, I checked my uptime...it was 10 days!

Now this is quite phenomenal considering the fact that my Mac is running in Safe Boot mode! Also, comparing my somewhat broken Mac in Safe Boot to a Dell GX280 with Vista: my Vista machine takes about 2 to 3 days uptime before it becomes as unresponsive as my Mac became today. Amazing!

Tags: apple, safe boot, uptime, performance, powerbook