The early smartphone era was wild. Motorola made the very first phone with iTunes on it for example
Wikipedia has google translate (2006) pre-dating android (2008) by 2 years. Iphone was 2007. It has improved significantly since, but it was pretty good even then. Adequate enough to communicate with foreign language speakers. I used to use it to email a japanese penpal, and while it may not have been perfect, it was understandable even then.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 1 day ago
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Not smartphone, but my dad’s Motorola phone that looked like this: (pre 2010s very old)
Had some weird ninja turtle game on it.
Cool Game I thought, but parents got mad that it automaticaly billed the phone company… not my fault, I’m the younger sibling so I think I mostly got away with it and my older brother was the one that got the most trouble, he tricked me to press the download button.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 1 day ago
Dude I didn’t even realize until your comment that I completely interchanged “mobile phone” with “smart phone” because that’s just how long it’s been since non-smart phones were really a thing
Damage@feddit.it 1 day ago
Yeah the problem came with verbal communication, you can’t transcribe a language you don’t understand, and good luck getting a stranger to type sentences on your smartphone (at a time when most people didn’t have one), you mostly got garbage translations. When speech-to-text got good enough for on the spot translation, that was a game changer, but that had to be around 2015 or something.
That’s assuming you had a connection at all, at the time you paid for connection DURATION, not traffic, so you were offline most of the time. And roaming data had impossible costs.