your first smartphone/computer?

Right, heres another thread similar to the your first audiogame thread. What was the first phone you had (or computer?) I got my iPhone 8+ in 2021 (and before that I had a galaxy a50 that my mom had) as well as some, uh, ZTE androids that one of them were very small so you could misclick something with talkback lol. As for computers. I had a chromebook that I used up until like 2024 but I stopped using that thing since you can do more on windows than on those android google book things lol (and my HP desktop has served me well sinced 2022.)

I sadly can't recall models, ah.

To prove that I'm old: My first phone was an Alcatel One Touch Max, way back in 1998. It was quite small for the time, but it had very annoying beeping key sounds. I got my first smartphone in 2016: a Motorola G4 Plus running Android 6.
I can't remember all the specifications of my first computer. The only thing I remember is a damaged 4 GB hard drive that made creepy noises and didn't last very long.

On computers I started off with a Texas Instruments 99/4A but I couldn't do much with it till much later when I started learning to program seriously in BASIC and had the voice module plus the Terminal Emulator 2 cartridge.

Still later I got the Radio Shack Color computer 2, then the 3. The 3 was of course better than the 2 and I wrote some pretty good programs on it.

The IBM world came to me when my younger brother let me have some kind of computer with not much hard drive space or memory. I was using cable Internet and it just couldn't handle that very well at all. That computer was running JAWS 4.0 and Windows Millennial Edition. I don't remember the year he gave this to me.

In the iPhone world I inherited a 6S from my wife back in 2017 or 18.

@3 how did the hard drive get damaged? Or did the computer come like that when the previous owner had it

It was a second-hand computer and the hard drive must have been faulty from the previous owner. However, this wasn't noticeable during normal use at first.

-- (MayowaArogundade):
@3 how did the hard drive get damaged? Or did the computer come like that when the previous owner had it
--

After I used the desktop pc's at school, my first laptop was some del thingy. It was solid enough but the frame near the screen would sometimes kinda open upwards so I had to push it down, it already got fixed once. In 2019 I got some hp laptop which was great, well, other than the fact that it had a dum hdd cuz parents dk how pc's work. In december 2021 that pc got replaced by a smaller Asus laptop I still have today, trying to sell it. The del was replaced by another hp laptop my school gave me in 2022. In 2024 I got myself an acer desktop pc, and last dec a macbook air m4.
My first iPhone was probably the iPhone SE. Then all kinds of phones. 6s, a galaxy s9, iPhone 7, 8, 12 mini, 14 and now 17 finally.

My first computer was a HP ZBook, with probably a 512 GB HDD. Never had anything like that since. All I ever get now are computers with 256 GB of storage. My first phone was an iPhone 6 in 2015, about the same time as the computer.

Phones: From IPhone 6 in 2020 to IPhone 8 eventually, then Samsung Galaxy a72 in 2021, Pixel 9 pro in 2025.
Computers: Acer laptop in November 2019, older desktop in October 2022 then ordered built in January 25.

Phones:
Huawai P Smart, started using it when I was around 3rd grade to call/listen to music, shared it with my mother.
iPhone X, pretty late actually, think around winter 2021?
then iPhone 14, Pixel 9 Pro throughout 2025 and now iPhone 17.
Started out with some trashy Dell Laptop also in 3rd grade, then some Medion around 6th, had the same model twice but it would just lock up and spam random letters so eventually switched to an Asus Laptop I still use for school stuff. My Desktop came in summer 2022.

I still use my foldable Blind Bombaclat 6 7 which has no touch. Only real, nice keys.

My first phone was an Alcatel, and then my first smartphone was an iPhone 4S in 2015.
My first laptop was an HP laptop with 4GB of RAM, an Intel Celeron processor, and 512GB of storage.
I still have that laptop somewhere and it still works, but I haven't used it in years.

Oh, my first smart phone was a Motorola Q, running Windows CE and Mobile Speak from Code Factory. I think that's what it's called. I have a post on my blog about its demise.

TBH if you want a PDA I'd recomend installing pocket hal, codefactory didn't even know what they were doing in 2007-14 when they had mobilespeak. Also the moto q ran windows mobile 5.0 I believe.

I don't even know if there was smart hal for the windows mobile smartphone edition devices though

The only thing I knew about then was Mobile Speak Smart phone. I seem to remember they called it MSS, so the second s was for smart phone.

My story is a bit more complicated! I got into the world of technology relatively late, around the age of 12 or 13. Before that, I used feature phones with physical keypads, without knowing anything about screen readers or accessibility features. I was at boarding school, and I used to ask a classmate to teach me how to navigate the menus. I would memorize sequences like pressing the down arrow twice, Select, down three times, right once, down once, and Select again to open the radio. Honestly, I'm still proud of the kid I was back then because I had a lot of phone numbers memorized. I tried saving them in the phonebook, but it was risky. Even if I learned that my mom was contact number 10, the order could change, or something unexpected could happen, and I might end up calling person number 11 instead. So I eventually memorized all the numbers. When I passed the 30-number mark, I started making Braille sheets with the phone numbers, basically a Braille phonebook, and organizing them in folders.

My first experience with a smartphone was in 2017, when I tried a classmate's iPhone 6s. Then, in 2019, during the pandemic, when we had to attend online classes, the school gave us some iPhones. I got an iPhone 6s Plus. I used it for three weeks, and during the third week, I accidentally turned off the speech output. My mom tried to turn it back on without knowing what was wrong and ended up enabling the screen curtain as well. The phone eventually shut down, and she thought it was broken. She didn't bother trying to restart it or figure out what had happened, so she asked the school for another phone. That's when I got my worst nightmare: a Huawei Y6 2018, which I smashed twice out of frustration because of how laggy it was. I used it until 2021. Honestly, I have no idea how I managed to put up with it for so long.

Meanwhile, the iPhone 6s Plus sat in a drawer for about two years. Eventually, I decided to check whether it was actually broken, and guess what? It wasn't! Hahaha. I didn't really want to use it anymore, though, and the battery was swollen anyway. I did use it for a while as a secondary phone, but I read a lot and would often leave it charging under my pillow. Its battery health dropped from 76% to 67%. Looking back, I definitely wasn't treating that battery very well!

After that came a Samsung Galaxy A51, which, to my embarrassment, I kept using until 2026. Around that time, I also started collecting phones, getting my hands on an iPhone SE (1st generation), an iPhone 5s, and an iPhone SE (2nd generation) that had fallen from about two meters onto the ground without a case, leaving both the front and back shattered and the microphones broken. Then I got the chance to add a Samsung Galaxy S9+ to my collection. I installed a custom ROM on it and used it alongside my A51. I kept it for about three months before getting an Honor Magic5 Lite, which I used for around four or five months. Now I have an iPhone 12, and I'm planning to upgrade to an iPhone 16.

As for laptops, I got an HP 245 G8 in 2022. Unfortunately, it gave up on me at the beginning of 2026. My little brother had dropped it in 2024, cracking the casing slightly. By 2026, the casing had completely failed around the power button. I had it repaired, but the damaged casing could still press the power button accidentally when I repositioned the laptop. Even though you can configure the power button in Windows to do nothing, holding it down for more than ten seconds still forces the laptop to shut down. Since I work in Reaper, I didn't want to take that risk.

Then a friend gave me a Dell Latitude 5480. He was actually planning to throw it away, but he told me he wanted me to have it, and he would have given it to me even if my old laptop hadn't broken. I accepted it, of course! I'm planning to get a Lenovo next, but I haven't decided which one yet. And even though I upgraded the HP from 8 GB of RAM, while the Dell has 16 GB, the Dell can be ridiculously slow in certain situations.

So that's my story with technology! I'd love to hear other people's stories too. I enjoy reading them. Right now, I'm hoping to get my hands on a Nokia Symbian phone and install Talks on it for my collection, but I have no idea how easy it would be to install Talks nowadays. I'd prefer to buy one from a blind person who already has Talks installed, but that's a story for another time.

I read that Symbian phones nowadays are hard to find, especially on ebay, they are all resold in China, whic means? Clones. Clones that are basically just the MediaTek OS under the nokia branding and so on.

My first phone was a foldable samsung from 2009 or 2010 i think. Then I got an other feature phone from samsung. Then 2014 i got a n56 from nokia with talks. That was my first phone i culd navigate without memorizing all klicks and sounds. oneor two years later i got an Iphone 5c, because alle said i should have one. Then came iphone 6s, Iphone 7, Iphone se2 and Iphone se3. After the last iphone and the possibility gone to talk with it because it just had broken mikrofones, i bought 2024 a samsung a555g, which i am using now. I have testet 2020 a blindshel classic 1 to, but it was not so cool in my opinion. Nowi have my a55 5g and a not broken Iphone se3 because i have many games and files in the system of apple.
My first computer was an yoga 2i1 convertible from linovo, my second an acer aspire 3. That was the coolest computer i have had as far. Now i have a desktop pc from hp and a Laptop for school from acer, a swift go 3. With the laptop i am not so happpy, because the sounds are laggy and it is getting very hot.

My first phone was a (Nokia (as I remember)) which had no Talks screen reader, and My first laptop was a Dell Laptop with 3 GB ram.