Steve Litchfield

This post was first written and published by me on AAWP and is both backed up and updated here with extra text and images... When a smartphone falls out of use in your life, there's a temptation to find a good home for it. Often a family member, often a second hand market like eBay, but sometimes - just sometimes - the phone is special enough, is unique enough, in fact is downright collectable enough, that you might like to hang onto it. Not necessarily just for pecuniary reasons, but perhaps sentimental reasons as well. As an example, I've picked out a dozen smartphones from my own collection that fit this bill. Classics one and all... I'm sure you'll agree with some of my picks, but you'll also have your own favourites. That's what the comments are for! I had a quick round-up from the office and found most of the devices listed below, at least. A spring clean does indeed beckon, I think, to find the rest! Note that some phones I've used were game changers...

[Yes, yes, a little self indulgent, but I was musing on such a list recently and thought 'Why not do it properly and do it in a blog post?'] I was chatting to my daughter and talking about the 'old days' when we used to make 'mix tapes' on cassette, painstakingly copying on tracks from other tapes or LPs to create curated compilations. She paused for a brief moment and then said 'you mean like a playlist?'(!) Ah. So yes, turns out the mix tape is redundant in 2023, but the idea of picking 10 (or 15, as has ended up here!) favourite tracks from a band, an artist, an era, or a genre, and then theoretically putting them into a playlist is a good idea still. Not least because it filters out a lot of the rubbish that every artist inserts. Because none are perfect and all are guilty of putting in 'filler' songs, let's face it. The better artists or bands have less filler, but it's still there, and therefore warrants a retrospective curation. In...