February is well underway already with heavy snowfalls and temperatures so low it slaps you into last Tuesday. However, instead of focusing on the cold, recently I made the decision to start my spring cleaning early this year. I had completed quite a bit of cleaning already when I sat down to have a nice, hot cup of joe when I looked over and, for the first time in a long time, realized that it had been a bit too long since I had gone through that "junk drawer" that just about everybody has in their home. The junk drawer has no limits; when I went to open it, I was greeted with all sorts of rubber bands, paper clips, buttons and odds and ends - but of course the most interesting things to me were the ancient technological relics that had been living there for who knows how long at this point.
They say that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone, but as true as that statement might ring for a lot of situations, there are plenty of situations in which it doesn't. As I was rummaging through the junk drawer and started coming across different devices of electronic's past, I started to think about how important those phones were to me at one point in time. For a good many of them, yes, I spent a lot of my time complaining about how terribly they worked or how unhappy I was with the device. But there were a couple among the many devices that made me smile remembering just how much I enjoyed using them at the time.
The first one that really made me smile was the HTC MyTouch 3G Slide. It was easy to remember why I liked it so much just by picking it up. It's a very small smartphone compared to today's screen size standards, but the phone just felt good in the hand. It had a good amount of heft, and in my opinion had one of the best build qualities out of any slide-out QWERTY Android I've ever used. It's kind of hard to explain how nice a well-built piece of hardware feels in the hand, but one thing I can say is that the phone had a lasting impression on me.
The next device I came across was the HTC EVO 4G, which was another great device in its own right, but not necessarily for the build quality. In fact, for the most part I hated the build quality of the EVO. At the time it felt too big (which is a laugh to think about now) and the removable back was hell to get on and off in just the right way. Also, why would anybody think it's a good idea to put the microSD card slot under the battery? But there was one good thing about the EVO's hardware, and that was the kickstand in the back. Whatever happened to those anyway? That thing was handy as ever. For the most part, though, my fond memories of the EVO mostly go back to A.) the 8-megpixel camera, which was uncommon in smartphones then, and B.) having one of very few 4G phones on the market, LTE or not, was still kind of cool. Did I ever get 4G speeds? Hardly, but you can bet that it still made me feel like a boss at the fact that every once in a while I could use whatever that dark magic they called 4G was.
And finally, although this device is no longer in my possession, I did briefly think about how much I loved my Apple iPhone 4S. I'm not too keen on iOS these days after the iOS 7 update, but you can bet your bottom dollar that back in late 2011 I was all over that iPhone 4S like gravy on a biscuit as it seemed to have run so much more smoothly than any Android I had ever used. I couldn't stand the fact that the front and back was made of glass, but like the HTC MyTouch 3G Slide it did feel good in the hand with a little bit of heft and honestly, as smoothly as the OS ran I couldn't care less if the phone looked like a potato (I probably would have cared a little bit, though).
I think over all of the devices that I've used over the years, the hardest goodbye was my iPhone 4S so far. I was so pleased with the device and its performance for so long that it really is the first phone that sticks out in my mind when I think back on which phone was my favorite to use. Would I go back to it? If I had to, sure, but to me it's more of a nostalgic thing. The iPhone 4S was a great phone, but after using newer models of phones it would be foolish of me to think that I would feel the exact same way about the 4S now as I did back then. Any phone that I had a good memory of is purely nostalgic at this point, but that doesn't make them any less worth remembering.
So now it's your turn, readers. Which phone of yours was the hardest to say goodbye to? It can be any phone; a flip phone, a Nokia brick, the old hamburger phone that sat by your bedside in early adolescence... let us know your hardest phone goodbyes in the comments below!
