Next page : My Smartphone Era
I started to work with mobile phones in 1987. I worked at AB Curt Enström, and was initially the only person in Sweden repairing the now defunct Technophone (it was bought by Nokia).
My first phone was a Technophone PC107. At that time almost no one had a “pocket sized” phone (570 g), and it was not uncommon that people came up and talk to me about the strange device I was using. The phone was provided by my work. To start with I would at that time not had afforded it, and secondly, I would never had paid so much for it anyhow as it costed then. But it was a fun “toy”. 
My next phone was a PC117. It was heavily modified, both when it came to the software (I could use it to listen to other peoples calls among other things) as well as the hardware. According to the NMT specs a phone should have a signal to noise level at above 20 dB at an input of -113 dBm. Most PC17’s and PC117’s had this down to -116 dBm, but my phone went down to -122 dB. This partly due to that I changed some critical components in the radio. (A selection of extremely low noise transistors in the radio signal paths does not hurt. )
I think I possibly was one of the first two persons in Sweden with a coloured phone case. I painted the top cover of the phone with red car paint, and my collogue, Niklas, did the same on his phone, but with white paint. I remember one day on the subway when I used my phone and someone said “Oh, you are the guy with the red phone”. That indicates how rare “pocket phones” where in those days.
I used a bunch of different phones for a while. One of them was the rather interesting Panasonic EB-3710. It was unusual because it had the display on the opposite side from the loudspeaker, i.e. you hold it with the display away from you when you talked in it.
It was comparable small for its days.
After this I had a period of Ericsson phones. To start with the NH97 (Ericsson 1931). I liked this phone a lot.
As you can see I have added a “wooden” case to it. Our firm AB Signalstyrkan (The Signal Strength Inc.) worked together with another firm with this. We removed the covers from the phones and they added the paintwork, then we resembled the phones.
After this I switched to GSM for the first time. Yet again I went with an Ericsson. this time a GH337 (1541). My friends at the company we worked with painted it with numbers since they knew I love maths (^^,).
Then I went back to Panasonic, and to the phone I liked the most since my beloved PC117. It was a blue EB-GD92, and I used it as my daily driver from 2001 to 2011.
It is an extremely light phone, only 79 grams, and it also had an extreeeemely low failure rate of about one in a thousand phone during the first year. Good job Panasonic.
That was the end of the non smart phone era for me.
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