this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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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
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.
I was a post-doc during this period. I had a mobile phone but data was eyebleedingly expensive, and there wasn't much to do on mobile. Most companies had a minimal web presence and very little directed towards mobile. I drove across the US in 2009 and even then it was better to use the information preloaded on my Garmin than the mobile web.
I remember it being iffy when I used it back then, the 8320 didn't have GPS so it was trying to use cell towers to figure out the turn by turn. It was slower, but not as slow as the connection speed would seem because every page load wasn't dependent on a thousand different CDNs and a hundred different trackers.
A dedicated GPS was essential for cross country (if you didn't want paper maps or printouts).