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My first smartphone was the iPhone 3GS. Recently I came across the phone tucked away in a box in my basement, so I decided to pull it out and boot it up, for old times' sake.
I first got the iPhone in March 2011, nine months after the iPhone 4 was released and only seven months before the release of the iPhone 4S. While my sister and I were away at university, my parents decided to upgrade all the phones on our family plan at once, and to save on upgrade costs they passed over the newer iPhone and purchased four 3GS units from AT&T at $50 USD each.
I was initially unhappy with their decision--my parents had not informed me ahead of time that they were going to deactivate my trusty Motorola Razr, nor had they consulted with me on what phone I wanted as a replacement. I had wanted my first smartphone to be an Android phone, and if it was going to be an Apple phone, I at least wanted to get the superior iPhone 4.
One of the first orders of business was to jailbreak the phone, and I enjoyed using it much more once I had done so. Many features we take for granted on smartphones today were completely absent in the iPhone 3GS, such as pop-up action menus when highlighting text or an all-device search function. Some of these features were present on the iPhone 4 but not the 3GS, and many developers backported them to older, jailbroken devices. For a while I even ran a backport of Siri from the iPhone 4S--I had used Siri when it was a standalone app and had loved it.
While I had the phone, I was in a passionate but ultimately fruitless relationship with a high school friend. I don't look back on the relationship itself with particular fondness today, but I still made many cherished memories with her and with my friends. A prominent example is her introducing me to Doctor Who during the tenure of Matt Smith; we would meet at various friends' houses each Saturday, I would use my phone to download the most recent Doctor Who episode via BitTorrent, and we would all geek out together.
I used the phone for twenty months, until a failing processor necessitated a replacement in November 2012. My next phone was an HTC Vivid, running the operating system I had wanted originally: Android. I have not owned another iPhone since then.
When I pulled out the iPhone yesterday, all the apps I had downloaded in 2011 and 2012 greeted me, including old versions of Wolfram Alpha, Google Chrome, and Dropbox. My user data (music, photos, notes, SMS messages, etc) has long been deleted from the device, most of it backed up to network storage where it can be stored safely. It feels a little strange to see a phone with all my old apps on it but none of my actual data--it's a similar feeling to visiting a house I lived in as a child but seeing no furniture in it.
The phone being as old as it is, the apps can no longer be updated, and with so much compatibility now broken, I have no real use for the device anymore. I'd love to see postmarketOS or some other third-party OS be ported to it one day, if only for novelty of it.
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[Last updated: 2021-10-28]