I Tried Living Like It's 2005 for a Week (And My Thumbs Still Hurt from T9 Texting)

In which I attempted to survive seven days with flip phones, MapQuest printouts, and the soul-crushing realization that the Motorola RAZR was actually considered "cool".

 

Twenty years ago, the Motorola RAZR was the height of mobile sophistication, MySpace let you rank your friends publicly (and cause lifelong trauma in the process), and if you wanted directions to somewhere then you printed them on actual paper and prayed you didn't miss a turn. No Uber, no YouTube music. no Instagram. Just you, your iPod with 5GB of storage, and a whole lot of patience.

So naturally, I decided to torture myself by living like it's 2005 for an entire week. No smartphone. No modern conveniences. Just me and the technology available exactly twenty years ago, trying to navigate a world that has since become unrecognizable.

What could possibly go wrong?

 

Day 1: The Setup, Or "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Flip Phone"

The first order of business: acquiring my 2005 tech arsenal. After scouring eBay and my old tech drawer, I assembled my kit:

• Motorola RAZR V3 (silver, because I have some dignity)
• iPod Nano 2GB (first generation, the one that scratched if you looked at it wrong)
• Canon PowerShot A520 (4 megapixels of pure photographic mediocrity)
• Dell Latitude D610 laptop running Windows XP (weighing approximately 47 pounds)
• A healthy sense of denial about what I'd gotten myself into

The RAZR turned out to be simultaneously the best and worst thing about 2005. It was impossibly thin at 13.9mm - which felt like holding a credit card after using modern smartphones. The screen? A luxurious 2.2 inches of 176x220 pixel glory. For context, that's roughly the resolution of a potato.

But here's what killed me: 5MB of storage. Not 5GB. Five. Megabytes. I could store maybe three low-res photos and a handful of text messages before the thing started wheezing. The Pixel in my drawer had 256GB. I was going from a spacious mansion to a storage unit.

The setup process was actually refreshing in its simplicity. No app store. No cloud sync. No software updates. I charged it fully, and the battery indicator basically laughed at me—this thing would last four days on a single charge because it had approximately four things it could do: call, text, take terrible photos, and play a MIDI ringtone version of "Crazy Train."

 

Day 2: The Great T9 Texting Disaster

My morning started with me trying to text my friends that I'd arrived at the coffee shop. Simple message: "I'm here, where are you?"

Twenty minutes later, I'd managed to produce: "I'n grrdr, wgrrr arr yoi?"

Let me explain T9 predictive text for those blessed enough to have forgotten. You had a numeric keypad where each number corresponded to multiple letters (2=ABC, 3=DEF, etc.). T9 tried to predict which word you meant based on the sequence of numbers. To type "here," I pressed 4-3-7-3. Sometimes T9 guessed correctly. Sometimes it gave me "gerd." Sometimes it offered me "ifsf" and I questioned its commitment to the English language.

The real chaos started when I tried to add punctuation. That required pressing 1 multiple times to cycle through options, and God help you if you overshot and had to cycle through ALL THE SYMBOLS AGAIN.

My thumbs started cramping after the fifth text message. My friends thought I was having a stroke. One replied: "Are you okay? Should I call someone?"

Another person just sent back: "???"

And here's the thing that got me - each text cost me 10p because I didn't have a texting plan. By Day 2, I'd already spent £4.50 on text messages. I started making actual phone calls because they were cheaper. Like an animal.

 

Day 3: Navigation Roulette, or "How I Got Lost Going out"

I needed to drive a couple of towns over for a meeting. In 2025, I'd just tap the address into Google Maps and go. In 2005, I had to visit MapQuest on my desktop computer the night before, type in the address, print out six pages of turn-by-turn directions, and hope for the best.

The printout told me things like "After 11 miles turn right onto Wilson Road" and "Continue for 0.5 miles." Very specific. Very confident. Completely useless the moment I missed turn #6 because a van blocked my view of the street sign.

And that's when I discovered the fundamental problem with printed directions: they don't recalculate. Once you're off the route, you're just a confused person holding useless paper while your blood pressure climbs. The paper map was also particularly poor at showing the current congestion of the roads. Anyway I pulled into a petrol station and did something I hadn't done in fifteen years - I asked a stranger for directions. "Oh yeah, Wilson? You're gonna want to go back about two miles, hang a right at the big oak tree—you know, the one that looks kind of dead—then you'll see a small corner shop. No not that corner shop, the other one..."

I arrived 47 minutes late to the meeting and was asked why I didn't text that I was running behind. I explained the T9 situation. She looked at me with pity generally reserved for injured animals.

 

Day 4: The iTunes Sync Incident

By Day 4, I was desperately bored with the 10 songs I'd initially loaded onto my iPod Nano. I wanted to add more music. This should be simple, right?

Wrong.

First, I had to find my laptop (all six pounds of it), wait for Windows XP to boot (about three minutes, accompanied by that start-up sound that definitely awoke dormant memories), open iTunes, and connect my iPod via the proprietary 30-pin cable.

Then came the sync process. iTunes cheerfully informed me it would take 12 minutes to sync 15 new songs. Twelve minutes for 45MB of data!

But wait - there's more! I'd forgotten about the tyranny of DRM-protected music. Half the songs I'd purchased from the iTunes Store in 2005 were locked with FairPlay protection. They would only play on authorized devices. I'd exceeded my authorization limit, so I had to deauthorize my old computer (which no longer exists) to authorize this Windows XP machine.

This took another 20 minutes and required me to reset my Apple ID password because I'd long ago changed the security questions from "What's your favourite colour?" to something involving cryptocurrency and existential dread.

I finally loaded the new songs. By this point, I'd burned an hour. In 2025, I could've discovered, downloaded, and listened to an entirely new album in YouTube music within two minutes.

As I disconnected the iPod, iTunes asked if I wanted to update to iTunes 6.0. I clicked yes. It took 45 minutes and required a restart.

I briefly considered violence.

 

Day 5: The Social Media Vacuum

This was the day I truly felt the isolation of 2005 technology.

Facebook existed, but only for college students with .edu email addresses. I was not welcome.

Instagram? Didn't exist. Twitter? Still a year away. TikTok? Might as well have asked for a teleporter. Reddit had just started but I hadn’t heard of it in 2005.

This meant there was no passive social media consumption. No scrolling through feeds. No watching Stories. No seeing what everyone was having for lunch. And you know what? The silence was deafening.

I found myself with something I hadn't experienced in years: boredom. Actual, crushing, what-do-I-do-with-my-hands boredom.

So I did what people did in 2005 - I logged onto AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). Well I would have if the company hadn’t closed it in 2017! :( I did the next best thing and remembered it fondly!

Oh, AIM. Sweet, chaotic AIM. I'd forgotten about the beauty of away messages, those little status updates where you'd post song lyrics, inside jokes, or cryptic messages designed to make your crush ask what was wrong.

The AIM experience was oddly refreshing. Conversations were deliberate. You knew when someone was actively typing because you could see "ChunkyLover53 is typing..." at the bottom. No read receipts haunting you. No pressure to respond instantly. You were either online or you weren't. Simple.

But here's what I'd forgotten: AIM only worked when you were sitting at your computer. No mobile version. No smartphone app. If I left my desk, I was unreachable.

The untethered freedom was... actually kind of nice? I walked to get coffee and nobody could bother me. Revolutionary.

 

Day 6: The Great Photo Upload Catastrophe

I'd been dutifully taking photos all week with my Canon PowerShot A520—a 4-megapixel beast that required four AA batteries and could store maybe 200 photos on its 256MB SD card.

The photos looked fine on the camera's 2-inch screen. Adorable, even.

Then I uploaded them to my computer.

They were... not good. They were "early 2000s Facebook profile picture" quality. Grainy. Poorly lit. Zero dynamic range. Every indoor shot looked like it was photographed during an eclipse. The 4-megapixel resolution meant any photo looked pixelated the moment you zoomed in even slightly.

But the real torture was the upload process. I had to:

1. Remove the SD card from the camera
2. Find the SD card reader
3. Plug it into the laptop's USB 2.0 port
4. Wait for Windows XP to recognize the device (3 minutes)
5. Navigate through folders to find the photos
6. Copy them to my computer (5 minutes for 50 photos)
7. Open each one in the default Windows Photo Viewer
8. Cry softly

Then, if I wanted to share them, I had to upload them to Flickr—which in 2005 was THE photo-sharing platform. The upload process took 15 minutes for 20 photos on my DSL connection.

No instant sharing. No cloud sync. No automatic backup. Just manual labor and regret.

My friend texted me (after I spent 10 minutes composing the message via T9): "Why do these photos look like they were taken with a microwave?"

I couldn't even argue.

 

Day 7: The Music Piracy Question I Won't Answer

Let's talk about music acquisition in 2005, shall we?

Legally, you had three options:

1. Buy CDs for £15-18 each and rip them to your computer
2. Buy individual songs from iTunes for £0.99 each (with DRM)
3. Buy albums from iTunes for £9.99-14.99 (also with DRM)

Illegally—and I'm not saying I did this, but statistically speaking, 1.7 million people were doing it daily—you could use LimeWire.

LimeWire was the Wild West of file sharing. You searched for a song, downloaded it, and either got:

• The actual song
• A virus
• A different song mislabelled as your song
• A Bill Clinton speech
• Dial-up modem sounds
• All of the above

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) was actively suing college students for thousands of dollars. They'd settled about 2,500 cases by 2005, with average settlements around $3,000. People were genuinely terrified.

But iTunes Store had sold 500 million songs by July 2005, proving there was a legal market. Of course, those songs were locked with DRM that prevented you from playing them on non-Apple devices, which felt like buying a book that could only be read in one specific chair.

For this week, I legally purchased songs from iTunes and ripped CDs I already owned. My music budget for the week: £47.93. In 2025, I pay £12.99/month for YouTube Premium and have access to over 100 million songs.

The math just doesn't math!

 

The Final Tally: What I Learned

After seven days in 2005, here's what nearly broke me:

The Bad:

• T9 texting made me want to throw my phone into a lake
• Getting lost with printed directions was not "an adventure," it was torture
• Photo quality was potato-grade
• Music syncing was a multi-step nightmare
• Social isolation was real - no passive connection to friends
• Every single task required planning and patience

The Surprisingly Good:

• Battery life on my RAZR was amazing (3 days!)
• Being unreachable while away from my desk was liberating
• AIM conversations felt more intentional and focused
• No social media scrolling meant I actually read two books
• The simplicity was calming - each device did one thing well

The Expensive:

• Text messages: £12.50
• Music purchases: £47.93
• Petrol from getting lost repeatedly: £13.00
• Replacement AA batteries for camera: £8.99
• Therapy cost for T9-induced rage: £130.00
• Total: £212.42

The Verdict:

Would I go back to 2005 technology permanently? Absolutely not. The lack of real-time navigation alone nearly destroyed me, and I'm pretty sure my thumbs have early-onset arthritis from T9 texting.

But here's the thing - there was something oddly peaceful about the intentionality of 2005 tech. Every action required thought. Every photo was deliberate. Every text message had to be worth the thumb cramping. You owned your music, your photos lived on your hard drive, and when you left your computer, you were truly disconnected.

 

In 2025, we have infinite convenience and infinite distraction. Everything is instant, effortless, and cloud-synced. But we're also constantly reachable, endlessly scrolling, and tethered to devices that demand our attention 24/7.

 

Maybe the sweet spot isn't 2005 or 2025 - it's somewhere in between. A world where we have modern convenience but 2005-era intentionality. Where we can use Google Maps but also occasionally put the phone down. Where we have YouTube Music but actually curate playlists instead of algorithmic recommendations. Where we're connected but not enslaved.

 

Or maybe I'm just romanticizing the past because I'm getting old.

 

Either way, I'm keeping my smartphone, my unlimited texting plan and Google Maps.

My thumbs have suffered enough.

 

Final note: The Motorola RAZR is now in a drawer next to my old iPod, my printed MapQuest directions, and a pile of AA batteries. The Dell laptop running Windows XP is on eBay listed as "vintage computing experience, very heavy, buyer pays shipping!"

 

No flip phones were harmed in the making of this article. But several were definitely cursed at.