I wanted to make a historical list of phones that I’ve owned over the years and the reasons why I purchased them in particular. I generally buy phones on the ‘S’ year (tick-tock cycle) when the small improvements have been made to it over time versus the major redesign years!

2007: An important day to remember in the history books…

<=2009: A long long time ago, we used to have flip phones, and at this point I had a BlackBerry Pearl !

2010: One of the first affordable smart phones I owned was the HTC Desire which ran an early version of Android OS and it was very mod-able/customize-able at the time vs the first iPhones back in those days!

2011: After some time of using an Android phone I remember my main complaint being that the battery life barely got me through the day. I then received a hand-me-down phone called the Apple iPhone 4S which had a beautifully-solid-all-glass design, much better battery life, and my first intro to iOS which felt much more put together but more limited in terms of what it allowed me to do with it!

2012: I then switched back to vanilla Android with the Google Nexus 4 because it offered a bigger screen size, a clean OS / unlocked phone, and it was a very low price compared to the competitors. Battery life again was so-so but the back glass looked amazing and sparkly!

2013: I switched back again to the Apple side with the Apple iPhone 5S even though it had a smaller screen size compared to the Android phones. I liked the square edge design in the Gold color and mainly because it was the first phone in the whole market to offer a fingerprint unlock. I grew tired of entering in the long PIN codes by hand with the Nexus and I also got the good battery life back again!

2015: I kept the 5S for a bit and then upgraded to the Apple iPhone 6S for the same reasons as before except this time it offered the bigger screen size and greater battery life. However, it was still an LCD panel compared to the Android phones which were leading the way with their more advanced screen technology!

2017: I had been waiting since the 6S for Apple to release a bigger-sized-but-less-than-6-inches, edge-to-edge OLED screen and they never did for quite some time. So I purchased the Samsung Galaxy S8 which offered best quality screen on the market in addition to a headphone jack, a fingerprint reader, and a modern version of Android OS. My main issue with this phone was not so much the phone part but the Samsung-as-a-company part where they only provided us with 2 years worth of OS updates for a thousand dollar phone… We also couldn’t unlock the boot-loader very easily (to upgrade the OS manually) or remove their forced apps (press F in the chat for Bixby) and I was getting worried about the security of the device over time!

2020: After nearly 5 years of waiting, Apple finally released a phone that had a smaller-than-6-inches + edge-to-edge OLED display. It was called the iPhone 12 Mini and I immediately purchased it and retired my old Samsung phone. I really appreciated the form factor of this phone and what it had to offer. Even though I do miss the headphone jack and fingerprint unlocker, it is very hard to find a small-sized, full-screen phone these days for those of us with smaller hands!

2021: And now, back to today, with the Apple iPhone 13 Mini Blue — it’s the ‘S’ year again! 🙂