The snap shut at the end of a call.
A flip phone thin enough to be a fashion object, sold on looks rather than function.
Ending a call by snapping it shut was unbeatable and no touchscreen has ever replicated it.
The keypad was etched metal, cold to the touch, and the software was genuinely awful. Nobody cared.
Cost back then
£250
Goes for now
£40–£200
Keep going
Point and shoot digital cameras that ate batteries, filled a card in an afternoon, and were still a revelation.
ADSL arrived with a microfilter on every phone socket and changed the household relationship with the internet permanently.
Apple's music player, and the click wheel that made scrolling through 5,000 songs genuinely pleasant.
Predictive text turned nine keys into a keyboard and created an entire dialect of abbreviations.