But by the summer of 1999 hope had arrived in the form of some new carriers. One of them was a company called clearNET. Like Bell their service ran on a digital PCS network; very much unlike Bell their pricing was easy to understand, and their plans generally cheaper. The trade-off was that clearNET’s service was confined to urban areas; to get a signal out in the country you had to “roam” on Bell or Rogers, at extra cost. For me a mobile phone was still a luxury, so this wasn’t an issue. And I spent most of my time in downtown Toronto, anyway… I was a hipster before hipsters were cool.

And so this mobile hipster became one of the early adopters of clearNET. I wasn’t alone, by any means; many of my friends and colleagues signed up with clearNET as well — thanks in no small part to their effective marketing. clearNET’s motto, “the future is friendly”, was a direct jab at the obfuscation practised by Bell and Rogers. Too many people would unwittingly walk into a Bell or Rogers Wireless store looking for a cheap cell phone and somehow walk out with a multi-year contract and a handset they didn’t want. Not so with clearNET.

Another clever clearNET idea was selling generic accessories with their own branding. An acquaintance of mine (who went on to star in a hit Broadway show) had a speaker phone for his car powered by the cigarette lighter jack. Though it was made of cheap plastic and sounded fairly tinny it had a very obvious clearNET logo on it, and I therefore wanted one.

My clearNET phone was a Nokia 6188, very similar to the 6185 I had used on Bell immediately prior. The big difference was the colour of the housing — whereas the 6185 was a morose grey my 6188 came in a funky sharkskin green. The only problem with this was that the surface was prone to scratches when dropped or even put into a pocket with keys. Fortunately for me clearNET had an extremely liberal return policy that allowed a customer to exchange any handset for a new one within 15 days of purchase, no questions asked. I abused this policy big-time, burning through at least three ever-so-slightly-scratched 6188s before finally succumbing and buying a protective pouch — a clearNET-branded one, of course.

In the year 2000 clearNET was bought up by Telus, a company from Western Canada. But I had already moved on to another upstart carrier, one that ran on an entirely different digital network from Europe. It proved to be a good choice; I stuck with them for the next ten years…

There was certainly nothing wrong with the hardware. It was my second Nokia, the 6185, in a business grey housing instead of whimsical blue. It also used a fancy new digital cellular network called PCS. In practical terms this meant that the screen (now LCD instead of LED) was now exponentially more useful because the phone supported call display. Yay, progress! Unfortunately a service bundle offered by my carrier ruined everything. I should have known that Bell couldn’t possibly deliver what they promised, a quantum leap forward in mobile technology that would put the power of the Internet in my hands, wherever I happened to be. It was — brace yourself… email on my mobile phone.

It was supposed to work like this: I’d log in to my Bell account on a desktop computer, and enter details for the email address I wanted to connect to my phone. I’m pretty sure the service only supported a single email address but remember, this was bleeding edge technology for the time. BlackBerry had launched their very first email device earlier in the year but I had never heard of it… Anyway, once the connection was set up my email would be forwarded in real time to my mobile phone. Even better, I could email replies — again, in real time. This was all made possible by some obscure mobile telephony standard from Europe called SMS, but I cared not for such trivial details… Email on my phone! How cool is that?!!

On the morning of my departure for Montreal I dutifully logged in to Bell Mobility’s website and entered the details of my Sympatico email address. Sympatico was the home Internet service offered by Bell Canada — come to think of it, I think Bell’s mobile email service only worked with a Sympatico account. Go figure. Back to the story… With everything set up I powered down my computer for the weekend and my girlfriend and I headed down to Union Station to catch our train, where I would surely use the next six hours in a productivity coup — sending and receiving emails like a boss and generally being the envy of everyone else on-board.

Instead, I spent the afternoon-long journey looking at a blank screen.

At the Bell in Montreal there was much furrowing of brows and scratching of heads. The staff were obliged to offer support, but I got the distinct feeling that this bleeding-edge technology was as new for them as it was for me. To their credit they finally got it working — intermittently, at least — and then the promise of email on the go was met with the unfortunate reality of a small screen that could, at best, display six lines of text. Worse, because of the 160-character limit of this SMS technology even a short email had to be broken up into five or six separate messages. It took the first two or three just to spit out the sender and subject!

Immediately upon my return to Toronto I proceeded immediately to the store where I’d purchased my “smartphone”, slammed it down on the counter and demanded an immediate refund. The experience was so frustrating that it moved me to write my first-ever blog post on the Internet, wherein I vowed to never again be wooed by the empty promise of new technology. In a blog post. On the Internet. I was doomed.

I owned a Bell version of Nokia’s 6185 for exactly one weekend. It was technically my first smartphone, and nothing that it was supposed to do actually worked. The experience was so bad that I blogged about it.

You can read another review lumping the 6185 and 6188 together on this popular mobile phone review site of the day.

The StarTAC was also my first flip phone. According to Wikipedia it was technically the world’s first “full” flip — the MicroTAC that preceded it only qualified as a semi because of its exposed earpiece. The point is, back then this was a design revelation. You didn’t need a case for the StarTAC because the phone protected itself when closed — that is, the screen and keypad folded up against each other, safe from harm’s way. An additional benefit of this design was that you could answer a call by flipping the handset open, though prying it apart like a clamshell would make the hinge last much longer. Note that this was in the days before cell phones had call display, so you couldn’t screen calls even if you wanted to. And thanks to the whip antenna you could pull another slick move. Remember in the movie Pulp Fiction when John Travolta, with a comatose Uma Thurman in the back seat of his car, yanked out the antenna of his cell phone with his teeth before dialling a number? Yeah, that move. Badass.

My hardware upgrade could have gone a different way — Bell also carried the Nokia 282 at the time. But the StarTAC had yet another trick up its sleeve: it was my first handset with a vibrate function. No big deal today, but back then you were seen as a person of means if your phone politely buzzed rather than beeped.

Speaking of snob appeal, the StarTAC was the first cell phone with available accessories that were actually worth paying for. At the high end was the prohibitively expensive lithium-ion battery; for those on a budget there was a more modestly priced clamp-on battery extender, making the diminutive Moto look a lot more like the bulky MicroTAC that preceded it. I stuck with the standard battery but got myself a car charger. Too bad I didn’t have a car to plug it in to.

As time passed ever more models of StarTAC and StarTAC accessories came to market. I can remember two or three other people I knew who also had one; we’d chat about battery life, accessories and such. In other words, this marked the first time that I experienced a sense of community around a mobile device. Prescient stuff, this…

I found two sources for the above image — one on this Indonesian blog and a (supposedly) Creative Commons version on this site.

According to Wikipedia Moto’s first model of the StarTAC line went by the moniker “StarTAC”; mine was most definitely the AMPS version.

Thanks to @docmobile on Twitter I think I’ve nailed down my first-ever cell phone — I’m fairly certain it was the Nokia 638 on Canada’s Bell Mobility network. Thing is, I’d love to get a photo of it in baby blue for the book, but so far I can only find this low-res graphic of a yellow one.

Little help?

P.S. Props to the Nokia Museum for putting their stuff online. I’d love to know if the images there are Creative Commons…

Back in mid-1990s Toronto (where I live) pay phones were still cheap and plentiful, and most of my time was spent either at home or in the theatre where I worked. For me, a cell phone was an unnecessary luxury.

It was a different story for my generous friend. He was an up-and-coming director of photography for music videos and TV commercials. He was always on location somewhere, and needed a mobile phone to secure his next gig, even while working the current one. He bought his Nokia first, the same model as mine but in a bright yellow housing. He loved it so much that he bought a matching yellow hard case for it — not a form-fitting case as we know it today but a small hard case with a handle, filled with foam and a cavity cut out for the device.

I needed no such protection for my Nokia; it went almost straight from the box to the bottom of my desk drawer, with the power shut off and battery removed. Starving comedian that I was I could barely afford to pay my bill, let alone risk going over my monthly allotment of minutes. I did take it out with me once to do a show at another theatre, where good fortune smiled upon me — my phone was stolen from the dressing room. Freedom!

But getting out of the contract with my carrier was another matter altogether. When I called Bell Mobility to cancel my service I was pushed to accept a replacement phone for only a little less than the two hundred or so Canadian dollars my buddy paid for the original. I politely declined. The price immediately dropped to a hundred. Nope. Then fifty. Really not interested… Finally it was offered to me for free. And a week or so later, a second grey version of the phone I never wanted showed up at my door.

Shortly afterwards the police called me up with the good news that my stolen blue Nokia had been recovered. Great, so now I had two phones, two batteries and two chargers entombed in the bowels of my desk. They stayed there for at least a year, until I gave them both away to someone I found through an online charity service.

This would be the first time I had two working mobile devices in my home simultaneously, but certainly not the last.