I Found My First Android Phone
📆 2026-09-14 10:32
While looking through my old room at my parents' house recently, I found something I hadn't seen in 10 years: my first Android phone the HTC Desire HD which was last used in July 2016.
And somehow, I managed to store it in the original box.
I honestly expected the battery to be completely dead after all these years... but I was wrong. I plugged it in and, to my surprise, the battery still charges and holds a charge.
That's probably the most impressive part of the whole discovery. After sitting forgotten for 10 years, the battery isn't completely destroyed.
A phone from another era
The phone is from the Gen Z era. It was a pretty impressive Android phone when I got it. Big screen, physical volume buttons, a proper camera, and HTC Sense making Android feel very different from the stock experience.
HTC Sense looked really good. Check out these screenshots:
( the phone still has the screen and back protector installed and looking good )
HTC Desire HD Last used in 2016
HTC Desire HD Unlock animation [video]
Pardon the shaking in the video - I didn't want to setup a tripod just to record a few seconds.
The weather widget doesn't sync anymore but it had a nice feature: I remember that the whole screen (widgets, app shortcuts etc) were covered in snow if weather said it was snowing outside. It looked amazing.
Back then, having a smartphone like this felt futuristic. It was my first phone that silenced the call if I flipped the phone. w0w
The Android version is ancient: 2.3.5. The built-in applications are ancient. Google services are ancient and, of course, you cannot login into Google anymore. The apps that are installed are essentially fossils. Even if I wanted to use it as a normal smartphone today, there isn't much I could realistically do with it.
And that's fine. I'm not really interested in making it useful again.
The phone itself is still alive. It's just that the world moved on. This HTC Desire HD is a nice reminder that hardware can survive software.
I'm not going to throw it away. For now, the HTC Desire HD is going back into its box with the battery removed from the phone. Yes, we could do this back then:
HTC Desire HD with battery removed
I didn't find the original charger. It doesn't matter since the phone has no modern apps and no practical purpose. It's just an old Android phone that somehow survived all these years. But, as I said earlier, I'm going to keep it. It has a place in my big blue ❤️.