At the start of the new millennium, cellphones were far different than the ones that most people hold in their hands today. Instead of these giant, homogenous rectangular slabs of glass that can't even fit into your pocket and feel like bricks in your hand, you had cellphones that came in all sorts of shapes and forms. There were Nokia bricks, Motorola Razr V3 styled flip phones, QWERTY keyboard cellphones like the T-Mobile Sidekick/Danger Hiptop and Blackberry, and many, many more. Cellphones back in the day used to fun, cool, and sort of a nice little novelty to own (and had novely features of their own, of course) and many kids who owned them became quite efficient in T9 texting and/or texting others without even having to look at the keyboard. Cellphones from back in the day were also quite efficiently small and very pocket friendly as opposed to most cellphones produced today as of February 2025, which are monstorously sized in comparison and there seems to be no signs in sight of this large screen madness ever ending, unfortunately.
Although the very first iPhone was released in May 2007, most people didn't even own cellphones that looked like that until around 2011/2012 or so (unless maybe they were rich or had rich parents or something).
On a similar note, in the pre-commonplace smartphone days, there were devices known as personal digital assistants, or PDAs for short, that were quite similar in their capabilities to the cellphones we see today, minus any calling or texting abilities (and small, of course, just like the actual cellular phones of the day were). These were mostly used by business professionals and include product lines like the Palm Treo.
The aughts truly were the golden age of cellphones and related technologies. Although I wish I could've gotten to use the cellphones from back in the day (and believe me when I say that being the cool kid who owns a Sidekick or whatever would totally rule), I do at least have a 4G flip phone that I'm quite satisfied with and have blinged out as many kids would seemingly do with their cellphones in the 2000s.
Important Note:
Unfortunately, many older cellphones and PDAs no longer work due to cellular networks in many countries shutting down their 2G and/or 3G networks (like they did here in the US in recent years). If you're considering getting a flip phone as of February 2025, it will need to be a 4G flip phone if you live in one of the affected 2G/3G shutdown countries due to this sort of planned obsolescence. :(
Also, if you plan on getting a Unihertz phone, make sure your carrier doesn't have any arbitrary carrier locks/restrictions that would prevent you from activating and using a cellphone not on the carrier's pre-approved cellphone whitelist on the carrier's network (looking at you, AT&T).
