Today, a decade and a half later, I’ve taken delivery of a Samsung Galaxy S II. If ever you wanted an illustration of the phenomenal pace at which technology advances, here it is. In what seems like an alarmingly short time, we’ve progressed from that rudimentary brick to a slim, slate-style affair with a vibrant full-colour touchscreen, a feature list as long as your arm, 16GB of internal storage and, well, slightly better battery life.

Consider that voice calls are now just a small part of a smartphone’s job and you could question whether the two phones are even really the same sort of device.

The change that’s really struck me, though, is the pricing. Back in 1996 I paid £30 for my old mr20, then signed up to Orange’s popular “Talk 15” plan. At £17.50 a month, this gave me a generous 15 minutes of voice calls a month, after which calls cost 10p a minute to Orange phones and, presumably, more to other sorts of phone. Hey, it was a long time ago.

As I mentioned, I couldn’t send SMS messages from my phone, and as for data services, forget it. This was 1996: most of us didn’t have the internet on our landlines, let alone our mobiles.

Now compare my new O2 contract, which starts today. Once more I’ve paid £30 up-front for the phone, and from here on I’ll be paying £21.50 a month. Accounting for inflation, that makes my new contract about 20% cheaper than my old Talk 15 tariff. Yet for that money I get vastly more than before: 200 minutes of talk time, unlimited text messages and 500MB of internet usage.

To be fair, the contract’s longer (two years, rather than one), but still, this represents an incredible increase in value. It’s easy to grumble about mobile phone providers, and often they deserve it: I’m sure we’ve all had frustrating experiences where providers switch around contracts in unwelcome ways, demand exorbitant fees for bog-standard services, screw up your credit rating or point-blank refuse to help with technical problems.

But when I reflect that, compared to my undergraduate self, I’m getting around 15 times as many minutes for my money – plus text messages – plus internet access – plus a phone that is itself, quite simply, gorgeous – it’s hard to feel too hard done by.

And I have to admit, I get a little excited trying to imagine what sort of phone I could possibly have in 15 years to make the S II look as ridiculously antiquated as the mr20 does now.

What terrible tariffs have you been on in the past? What chunky phones are you now ashamed to admit you once proudly carried around in an unseemly bulging pocket? While my positive mood lasts I’m declaring an amnesty, so share your worst!

For starters, Handcent does away with the default status-bar notification, replacing it with a neat popup that displays the message, its sender and a quick reply box along with some basic options. It’s a far neater way of dealing with a text than having to navigate into the app itself.

Handcent also includes a smart widget that, predictably, improves upon the awkward Rolodex-style tool included by HTC. It takes up half a screen when placed on my Hero’s desktop – rather than the whole screen used by the  HTC widget – and displays your last 20 texts along with a picture of the sender. Tap this and you can reply to or delete the particular message, or compose a new one.

If you’re looking for more options then it’s worth delving into Handcent’s menus. Android’s dull text interface can be replaced with a couple of skins, and you can choose to display contact pictures or a different background image within conversations. Numerous graphical elements can be changed, too, from the font and colour of sent and recieved messages to the colour of message windows. Handcent displays these changes in a small preview conversation, too, so it’s easy to see if your tweaks are having the desired effect.

Similar attention to detail is found in Handcent’s notification settings. That handy popup is at the mercy of more than a dozen potential tweaks, and you can even change the style of the notification that appears in Android’s status bar, as well as the colour that your phone’s LED will blink when you’ve got a message.

Paranoid texters can employ Handcent’s security settings, which can protect your texts with either pattern or number locks – or, if you’re more traditional, with a password.

The handy popup, useful widget and fastidious attention to detail  mean that Handcent has replaced Android’s default app as our text tool of choice. And, as an added bonus, it’s free – so there’s no excuse not to download.

Click here to read our 36 best Android Apps feature

Will other technological milestones be celebrated in similar ways, I wonder?

Will the 40th anniversary of the internet’s creation be honoured by people bouncing emails off of Tim Berners-Lee’s laptop? Will we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the GSM network by routing SMS messages through Friedhelm Hillebrand’s mobile?

No, probably not.