It was so sad you could not watch a 30 seconds ad to revive back then. No cosmetics to buy, nothing. Just an ugly snake running around.
/s
What are you talking about? Ringtones were the original paid cosmetics!
Ringtones and these Logo banners!
Excellent point about ads. Yes I still remember when every internet site DID NOT have advertising
Back then, websites didn’t need to show ads. They just distributed adware. Those days are long gone…
That shows a picture of a browser with a million search bars installed. This feels like it was more of a thing between 1998 and 2002. I’d say that wasn’t early Internet, it was when it started to become mainstream.
If you want free games with minimal functionality there is always f-droid.
Actually, Nokia’s first Java phone, 3410 (the one on the right except with a different key layout) featured a store with downloadable games, ringtones, screensavers, picture messages etc. Czech provider Eurotel distributed the first 3D Java game Munkiki’s Castles as a loss leader, and Space Impact came preinstalled but was very short unless you paid for downloadable missions.
I used to work for a J2ME mobile games developer. Fun times but it was wild west. They didn’t properly standardize the API so each mobile phone had its own glitches, incompatibilities and extra APIs and the emulatos were not very accurate either. That meant we basically had to have pretty much all phones there to test the games.
The fucking battery is almost empty after just three days! Just because I played Snake every break.
Still have a core memory of sitting in the toilet, a long time after having finished my business, still playing snake and beating my highest score by a lot!
I still have one of these somewhere. It didn’t break but the charger did
And you could use the IR blaster to play multiplayer games.
I remember paying 3$ for a ringtone
I remember making my own ringtone on the Nokia
Everyone Nokia user knows that Space Impact was a better game than Snake
Later on I got a phone with Bounce, now that was the tits
You were also able to type out a message and send it using a single hand, you only needed to recharge the phone once a week, and it didn’t shatter like an icicle if you so much as sneezed at it, it was cheap and it didn’t spy on you. Smart phones is the dumbest thing that happened to humanity.
Once a week? Those things could go pretty much forever on a single charge so long as you weren’t making calls, even with batteries that had a tiny fraction of modern capacity due to their simple hardware.
Nowadays even a completely idle smartphone on extreme power saving mode is lucky to last a couple of days, especially if you don’t/can’t disable the vendor-mandated bloatware that periodically wakes it up to phone home. When used regularly, it’s not uncommon for a phone to drain within a single day.
Sometimes I miss the simple, rugged designs - right up until I remember how much better smartphones are at literally everything else. Still wish companies would get the memo and focus on bigger batteries rather than smaller phones, though.
