My first one was a Samsung Galaxy S1 that I got in 2013 and it was a great little device that was easy to open up and repair. It had only 512MB of RAM but that was plenty for basic phone needs, web browsing and running some Android apps like AnkiDroid at the time.
I remained a blackberry user for too long. I had a number of them and I wasn’t interested in the Apple phone. Then I had a terrible BB Storm which would freeze up all the time.
I called my telco frustrated by the POS. They gave me a $100 credit to go buy a pay and talk android phone (LG something) and wait for a month for the Samsung S2 to come out. Once it arrived I would be sent one. The pay and talk LG blew my blackberry out of the water as it was a full internet experience unlike the BB that was translating all internet experiences to reduce data used on networks that couldn’t handle data to start out with.
The S2 was amazing compared to my BB’s. I did miss the physical keyboard until I started using Swype. Then I couldn’t go back.
I recall minutes being a big revenue generator for telcos, then it became data once the networks could handle it with the iPhone. Now it seems like they are giving away tons of data these days. What’s driving revenue now for them I wonder?