Comment on Those were the days
Damage@slrpnk.net 2 months agoOld dumb phones could not play arbitrary audio… Well, aside from phone calls of course. Ringtones were a series of… Tones! Kinda like a midi file, ever heard of that?
Extra fun fact, the original iPhone only had THE iphone ringtone, and you could not change it.
UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Oh, was this because of limited processing power / slow secondary storage read speeds?
NO WAY… Oof that must’ve been so annoying, no? Ur phone being a waking advertisement to everyone around you?
Damage@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
All of that and more. They didn’t have mass memory, so you had a maximum number of contacts, a maximum number of SMS, a maximum number of ringtones… but you couldn’t delete ringtones to make room for SMSses or such. They were a completely different tech.
They loved it. Also it couldn’t share media (messaging apps didn’t exist yet and it didn’t support MMS) and was GSM only, so to actually do anything smart it had to be connected to WiFi.
gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
That and we hadn’t settled on standards nearly to the degree we have now. Much like charging cables it was the wild West for some shit out there. Also, many phones actually did support MIDI, but most normal users didn’t know what to do with it lol
Back then it was status. “Look at me, I have an IPHOOOOONEEEEE”