Phones Of The DCT Team In 2024 – Part 1

Way back in the annals of time – April 2015 to be exact – Jim Hillier asked the DCT team which mobile phones we were using in SmartPhones: What the DCT Team Uses and Why. That’s a humongous nine years ago and as we all know, technology is now light years ahead of what it was back then. In 2015, mobile phones were still used primarily for actual phone calls (remember those?) and texting. Phone cameras were improving with each iteration, ranging from 8 to 16 megapixels and many still boasted removable batteries. But, in the intervening years, as technology has sprinted along, many features that we thought were impossible to live without – think floppy drives, serial/parallel ports, CD drives, etc on PCs – have largely disappeared. Removable batteries, headphone jacks, and SD card storage are just a few features now largely consigned to history.

What We Were Using In 2015

Most of the authors of that year are still on the team and of course, we also have new writers on the team, but back then, these are the phones we were using:

• HTC One M9 (two authors owned this model)
• Samsung Galaxy S4
• iPhone 6
• Samsung Galaxy S3 (two authors owned this model)

Clearly, Android phones were the most popular choice at that time, perhaps because they offered more feature choices as opposed to the walled garden of iOS and the need to ‘jailbreak’ an iPhone for more customisation. It also seems that we were changing phones more often than we do now, but that trend has changed significantly for reasons that will become obvious later in these articles. It was also clear that flip phones held a nostalgic place in many users’ preferences and guess what? Yes, they’re back!

What The Team Uses In 2024

Jim Hillier – iPhone 13 Pro Max

Jim lives in an area with poor mobile phone reception and used to own a Nokia flip phone which entailed having to stand outside the house or even on top of his station wagon just to get a decent signal. Mind you, we’ve all done that at one time or another, but when Jim’s grandchildren came to visit and he saw that they all had iPhones with superb coverage inside the house and out, he decided to move to the dark side and switched over to iPhones. The specs of the iPhone 13 Pro Max speak for themselves – 12Mp/2160p camera, 128GB/256GB/1TB storage, and HDR being only some of the outstanding features.

Carol Bratt also owns an iPhone 13 Pro Max.

Terry Hollett

Samsung Galaxy J3

Terry doesn’t use his mobile phone a great deal, mainly because it has a fault that requires him to remove the battery and charge it using an adaptor, which is another shout-out for removable batteries in my opinion. Besides, Terry is one of our most prolific authors here at DCT, so he dedicates most of his time to writing useful articles rather than playing with such foibles.

Stuart Berg

Samsung Galaxy A54 5G

Stuart is delighted with his Samsung Galaxy A54 5G which he bought in November last year and he, along with Jim is using a 5G phone. He’s also very pleased with the specs compared to his old Motorola – 256GB of storage, 8GB of RAM, and a 50Mp camera. He also finds Bluetooth connectivity very useful for connecting to other devices without disturbing people around him, which is a major consideration in the noisy world that we currently inhabit.

1. Phones Of The DCT Team In 2024 – Part 1  ⬅ You are here
2. Phones Of The DCT Team In 2024 – Part 2

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