Motorola C390

Status: 🟢 Fully functional 🟤 Sticky housing

This little fella was my first ever mobile phone. Well, not this exact one, but an older and simpler model. The Motorola C390 is an upgraded version of the Motorola C380/C385. The main difference in the new model is the addition of a Bluetooth module. This made the C390 the most affordable mobile phone for businessmen who needed a wireless headset for convenience.

Through the same Bluetooth module, you could connect the computer to the internet and even transfer files. It’s worth noting that Bluetooth modules for computers were astronomically expensive, slow, and incredibly complex to set up at the time, so this option was often discarded. The built-in memory of the little guy was only 1.8 megabytes. With great effort, you could squeeze out 2.5 megabytes by deleting all standard pictures, apps, and melodies. Back then, you could fit something useful into such amount of memory. For example, I could easily run the Jabber client Bombus, the Opera Mini browser, and several e-books.

Nevertheless, the new upgrade added €20 to the initial price of €90, making it practically impossible for a teenager to save up for a new cellphone from school lunch allowance. Overall, I wished for the same €110 model to be released, but equipped with a memory card slot. Despite the limited hardware power of this tiny phone, it could play MP3s and, with some tricks, even videos in 3GP format. It was a very capable platform with extremely constrained capabilities.

I used my original C380 extensively. The battery was extremely weak even by those standards. That’s when I learned what it meant to charge a phone daily or even more often, while some Nokia brick could last over a week with light use or three days with heavy use. However, the ease of internet setup made up for everything, and we connected not to the ultra-expensive WAP, but to the real WWW, which cost 30 cents per megabyte at the time. This is exactly why the Opera Mini browser was needed, as it effectively proxied, compressed, and cached traffic.

The internet was easily set up on PCs too, even under Linux. In the latter case, it was even better since no special driver installation was required; you just needed to install and launch wvdial available in Ubuntu’s standard repository. Thirty cents per megabyte, a caching proxy in the Opera browser, and disabling image loading made internet surfing mostly acceptable. At least many phpBB-based forums supported simplified viewing mode, and back then, forums were almost the primary means of communication on the internet. Well, ICQ too, but even then, I was urging my friends to switch to XMPP, due to my youthful maximalist commitment to open standards.

In terms of hardware, there was also a huge bonus from Motorola in the C380 and C390 models for connecting to a computer: at the bottom edge of the phone, there was a standard Mini-USB port, and you could find a cable for it for around €5 in any tech shop. Considering that specialized proprietary data cables often didn’t come with the basic package and had to be found separately and sometimes for a lot of money, this was a great advantage.