• Dr. Bob@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    This was a unique point in time when people had cell phones but had to carry a phonebook because there was no mobile internet. Some time between 1992 and 2005?

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      Even once mobile internet was introduced, it was really expensive and many businesses didn’t have a web presence that would work on mobile. It’s only since maybe 2011 that someone could look up a business on their phone and be relatively confident that they’d find contact info on a mobile friendly page and not blow out their monthly data allowance in the process.

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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      3 months ago

      I remember in 2005, pulling over and calling my sister for directions on my flip phone because I got lost.

      I didn’t get mobile internet until like 2010. Not because I couldn’t, but because it was wildly expensive for a bad experience, since “mobile-friendly” was non-existent.

      This was also during the era when Google Maps was a brand new website, not a app. I think I was still MapQuesting.

    • boonhet@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      Even in 2005, mobile internet was so shit, it might as well not have existed. 2007-2008 was when 3G was starting to get rolled out I believe, but even that was pretty damn slow and expensive. 3.5G in ~2010+ is when things were usable enough that you could perform a Google search without giving up before the your first result loads.

    • tiramichu@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      In the UK at least, mobile phone ownership per household was only 16% in 1996 and didn’t reach 50% until the year 2000.

      To have a phone in '92 you’d need to either be wealthy or have it through a company for business.

      My dad had a phone in 95 for work and it was an absolute brick.

      As for mobile internet, that wasn’t really a thing until smartphones happened with the iPhone. Yes we had WAP and other precursors to the full internet but it was awful and nobody used it, ever. In 2007 I was a geeky nerd at uni doing Comp Sci and had a Windows Mobile PDA in a belt holster, with full internet! But most people didn’t have Internet until about 2009-10

      • ITGuyLevi@programming.dev
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        3 months ago

        Do you mean the Cisco iPhone from the 90s or the Brazilian iphone from the early '00s? I’m totally just taking the piss though, I know you mean the Apple one from the later '00s but it wasn’t that rare to have mobile internet before it, they were just riding the wave that was already breaking across society.

        Apple had a major advantage though, lots of people were already eyeing their popular mp3 player, if a phone could be a phone, internet, and a good music player you can sync easily, it won for a lot of people. I couldn’t justify the price and really liked physical keyboards, by the time those became rare I disliked Apple too much to try them.

        Somewhere I have my old BB 8320 from 2007, it was awesome because it had WiFi so much better speed when WiFi was available.

        • mynameisigglepiggle@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          I’m with the op on this one, I had just about every device under the sun, but mobile internet wasn’t a thing in Australia until we had a proper mobile browser, and that was with the iPhone. I vividly remember whipping out my 3gs to browse the internet, people being amazed, but it also being absolute shit if you were on the move or in most places. I would say ubiquitous reliable mobile internet wasn’t a thing until maybe 2012-13

      • deltapi@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        My Father had a ‘car phone’ from 1990-1999ish and then switched to a nokia 3210 or similar. While he had the ‘car phone’, he kept a phone book in the car. By the time of the Nokia, his outbound calling was predictable enough that he either had it saved on the phone or he used ‘411’ to have an operator look up the number.