These phones showed your class back in the days

Since the 90’s, mobile phones have come a long way, and to some Ghanaians, only the rich and privileged back then owned these mobile devices.

From the Motorola MicroTAC mobile phone, to the Nokia 3310, Samsung SGH-T100, Nokia N-Gage, BlackBerry 5810, amongst others.

GhanaWeb takes a look at some of these devices, when mobile phones started to gravitate towards more slim line designs, with affordable prices.

Nostalgia, prepare for it.

Motorola MicroTAC 9800X

In 1988, the Motorola MicroTAC had a pretty long shelf life when it was first introduced but then went through a few changes that moved it from an analogue phone to a GDM-compatible handset in 1994.

It was eventually succeeded by Motorola’s StarTAC in 1996, which was one of the first ‘true’ mobile-capable phones ever released.

Motorola reportedly sold about 60 million units of the StarTac.

Nokia 6110



The very popular Nokia 6110 phone was the first mobile phone to use an ARM processor, and was just one of a long line of 6xxx series phones from the Finnish mobile manufacturing company, Nokia.

With excellent battery life, the 1998 Nokia 5110 became the standard for most Communication Centre business that operated in Ghana at the time.

It became the first device to run the legendary Snake game, Logic and featured the Calculator, Clock and Calendar Currency converter.

It was from the 6110’s popularity, that Nokia decided to include Snake in the majority of their phones and future sequels of Snake.

Samsung SGH-T100

Before Samsung took over the world it made handsets like the Samsung SGH-T100, which was the first phone ever to use a thin-film transistor active-matrix LCD display.

Nokia 3310



The Nokia 3310 in the 90s became the phone that many Ghanaians had to own – with a very lasting battery life and an array of ringtones, the Nokia 3310 was regarded as one of the best mobile devices ever created. Till date, some even say it’s indestructible.

BlackBerry 5810



The BlackBerry 5810 was the first BlackBerry phone released by RIM and the first BlackBerry OS 3.6 device.

The phone was released in 2002 and needed a headset to call people with because it didn't have a speaker built in so users had to plug headphones in to make phone calls, but the BlackBerry 5810 did have email and a QWERTY keyboard.

Nokia N-GAGE



The Nokia N-GAGE was the first ever “gaming phone”. It ran on Symbian and featured a rather unique design, whereby the keys were set out on the side of the display.

The phone was designed in an attempt to lure away gamers from Nintendo’s Game Boy Advanced. The handset also included support for apps and also MP3, making it a true smartphone in every sense of the word.

On sale between 2003 and 2005, it was reported that Nokia sold about three million units of this device.

Motorola Razr V3



The Motorola Razr was a series of mobile phones by Motorola, part of the 4LTR line. The V3 was the first phone released in the series and was introduced in July 2004 and released in the market in the third quarter of 2004.

Motorola shifted over a 130 million of the phones between the years 2004 and 2006, making it the best-selling clamshell handset in history.

The V3 model was followed soon thereafter by the much improved V3i with a collaboration with Apple Inc. for iTunes to be built-in.

Nokia N95



The Nokia N95 smartphone produced by Nokia was part of its Nseries line of portable devices. Announced in September 2006, it was released to the market in March 2007.

The phone ran on Symbian, packed in a 332MHz Texas Instruments CPU, and feature 160MB of RAM. It also featured a decent 5-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi.