My mom had this exact model but in red instead of blue and I thought it was the shit. It was released in 2010 and I remember thinking having an actual keyboard on a phone was so cool. I also remember having no games to play on my parents' phones except Snake.
Here's a glimpse of my childhood (the shows are largely American, but this is just stuff I found from my childhood board on my WeHeartIt account):
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
(If you remember when Dora started like that, with the green computer and everything, I'm impressed, and also Rolie Polie Olie was the reason why I drew my women's dresses in the shape of triangles throughout my childhood. ALSO YEAH, IT WAS PLAYHOUSE DISNEY, AND IT WAS WHAT DISNEY WAS CALLED IN THE MORNING, NOT DISNEY JR. And Nick Jr. was called Noggin. Pour one out for Moose and Zee.)
Also, in my DVD of Cinderella, I have an extra with the Disney Channel stars singing "A Dream is A Wish Your Heart Makes" and it's like a portal back in time. RICKY ULLMAN, MY FIRST CELEBRITY CRUSH. THE SPROUSE TWINS BEING TINY BABIES. RAVEN. ALY MICHALKA.
These are different things that were popular across a generation (for the shows, maybe mostly in the US, and since I'm curious, what were some of your favorite childhood shows if you live outside the US? Are any of these the same?). If I had randomly stood on a hallway at my high school and shouted, "NOBODY CALLS ESTEBAN JULIO RICARDO MONTONYA DE LA ROSA RAMIREZ A THIEF!" I can guarantee that at least thirty people would have chimed back, "NO ONE'S GOT THE TIME!"
But when you look at recent years, those similarities start to blur. I have some younger cousins who are 7-10 and let me tell you, our childhood experiences were completely different. However, with the current definition of Gen Z, we would be considered the same generation because they were born in 2010, 2011, and 2012. Aka "the early 2010s."
This is the generation that I would consider the iGeneration ("i" for "internet"). They were either born after the invention of smartphones/tablets or too young to remember a time without them. They grew up being handed phones or tablets to play games on to pass the time instead of coloring books or nothing but their imagination. Instead of having to do a high-speed sprint to the bathroom during commercial breaks like they were training for the Olympics before a show came back on, they can just rewind and catch whatever they missed.
