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Announcements Mar 26, 2026 at 4:30 AM

Remember when TV writers didn't quite know what smartphones were called yet, so they called them "camera phones" ?

Posted by visiny

Or internet phones. I mean, they're not wrong, but it's just funny watching sitcoms from the late 2000s or even early 2010s and seeing how the lingo was still being figured out over what this new device that was going to overtake our lives in a few years was called. And considering how rapidly technology advances, I always wonder what's exactly the timing between when news hits and when an episode airs. Like, do writers come up with plots week to week to shoot an episode, or do they have the entire season already written with all the pop culture references and jokes and whatnot, and just shoot the thing week to week.
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adsfew Mar 26, 2026 +46
But we did call them "camera phones"
46
smbrgr Mar 26, 2026 +10
Yeah, they were “camera phones” when the most interesting thing about them was the camera. That was the early oughts, before phones had meaningful internet access for the average user. But they had a camera!!! It was cool as hell.
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Jr05s Mar 26, 2026 +18
When phones first started getting cameras... they were camera phones. 
18
MultiPass21 Mar 26, 2026 +14
You sound young. They were advertised as camera phones up until Blackberry walked so iPhone could run.
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ExultantSandwich Mar 26, 2026 +1
Blackberries and Sidekicks had good branding, so good that referring to them by name became common, so we went from camera phones to blackberries and sidekicks, delaying the common use of the term smartphone. iPhone, Android and Windows Phone all convalescing in short order made the term smartphone a useful catch all
1
jonfitt Mar 26, 2026 +6
Smart phones came after camera phones. You could send a picture as an MMS and save the pictures to a computer with a sync cable. But while they might have had a WAP browser (look it up), they couldn’t get to the Internet.
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BORT_licenceplate Mar 26, 2026 +3
I used to put $30 prepaid credit on my phone and I accidentally opened my WAP browser once and it ate all my data in like 5 seconds struggling to load Yahoo's landing page logo and like 3 links to the latest news
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adsfew Mar 26, 2026 +1
It's 2026--there's no shame in opening up your WAP
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BORT_licenceplate Mar 26, 2026 +5
Well they weren't really smartphones, they were camera phones. Like in 2006 my friend had a Nokia N95 (I think, maybe i'm misremembering the model) and it took pictures but connecting to the internet was extremely expensive and there weren't any apps to download or an app store on it. Facebook was in its infancy and there was no facebook messenger. A lot of phones that had cameras didnt have a touch screen either
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Sonichu- Mar 26, 2026 +6
You know we actually called them that… right?
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adorablegadget Mar 26, 2026 +5
We didn't call then smart phones because they weren't. That term only started being used after heavy marketing from Apple.
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adamg511 Mar 26, 2026 +3
The biggest selling phones before the iPhone were the Nokia 1100 and Motorola Razr. Data was slow and expensive before 3G. Most of us really did only have phones with cameras
3
mehelpyouhelp Mar 26, 2026
There as a time in between where there were *new* phones with cameras, that weren’t yet *smart*. So they were just **“camera phones”**.
0
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