Happy birthday to the Nokia 3310: 20 years ago, it seemed like almost everyone owned this legendary mobile
- Reference: 1598974628
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/09/01/nokia_3310_is_20/
- Source link:
For a fleeting period, this bulky handset was the phone to have. Austere by today's standards, it stood out thanks to its generous collection of bundled software (like Snake ) and relatively sophisticated SMS-based chat software.
And that's without mentioning the phone's durability, which inspired both mockery and exaggeration. Legend says that when the nuclear bombs fall, only the cockroaches and 3310s will survive. Though that might be (and absolutely is) completely made up, Nokia's top-selling feature phone proved capable of withstanding the occasional drop or plunge into muddy festival fields.
But while much attention is slathered on the phone's legacy, little is said of its actual launch. From the outset, the 3310 was unambiguously a consumer device, and thus the Finnish mobile giant opted to launch it at an extreme sports event called "Don't be bored. Be totally board." This time we're not making it up.
20 years of GSM digital mobile phones [1]READ MORE
At that point, the mobile sector was still in its infancy. A survey conducted in the US in 2000 showed that [2]only 28.3 per cent [PDF] of people owned a cellular phone, with a further 11.1 per cent sharing a device with another household member. While cellphones were on an obvious upward trajectory, it's fair to say that the Nokia 3310 helped accelerate that trend, with around 120 million devices sold during its lifespan.
[3]
Maybe yours is stowed away in a similarly chaotic drawer of forgotten cables
Ben Wood, analyst at CCS Insight and curator of the Mobile Phone Museum, remembers the 3310 well. Speaking to El Reg , he said: "The Nokia 3310 is a true icon in the mobile phone world. Having sold over 120 million units its ubiquity meant that it is a device that many people owned, often as their first mobile phone. This means it generates a real sense of nostalgia which further underlines its status as one of the most important mobile phones of all time.
"The robust design made it almost indestructible in daily use and its ease of use meant that it became a firm favourite with customers. It is little surprise the design was rebooted in 2017 by HMD Global, the company that now licenses the Nokia brand for phones."
The most recent 3310 version apes the aesthetic of the original well, although ditches some of its simplicity for a bevy of modern accoutrements, including a colour display and a 2MP rear camera. It couldn't repeat its predecessors genre-defining success, but it was nonetheless a major win for HMD Global, initially selling out and kick-starting a range of retro-inspired feature phones, most recently the [4]Nokia 5310 . ®
Get our [5]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/09/20_years_of_gsm_digital_phones/
[2] http://www.asasrms.org/Proceedings/y2005/files/JSM2005-000345.pdf
[3] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/02/28/shutterstock_nokia_phone.jpg
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/20/nokia_5310_review/
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
I'm sure they'll appreciate your drawering their attention to it.
My bad...
I'll See Your 33xx and Lower You
3310? Surely the 3210 [which was released a year earlier] was the iconic Nokia [0] that everyone had?
I know I had the 3210 and as everyone here will tell you; I'm a barometer of cool.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3210
Re: I'll See Your 33xx and Lower You
Na, the cool kids like me had the WAP-capable 3330. So we could load both websites available.
But yeah, I'd say the 3210 was pretty ubiquitous and had the original Snake (not Snake II like the 33xx)
Re: I'll See Your 33xx and Lower You
I think the cool kids moved from the 3310 to the 6210, no?
Re: I'll See Your 33xx and Lower You
Yeah, the retrospective attention the 3310 gets over the 3210 is at odds with my memory of events. What is it that I'm missing - did the 3310 sell massively better than its predecessor? Was I in a bubble at the time because I was a student?
The 3310, with no visible aerial, was quite striking when it first appeared. It was common, too, and replacement Xpress-on cases (both shoddy 3rd party and pricey Nokia versions) were everywhere.
I recall the 3310 didn't look quite as good, though it was a touch more compact, and used a white LED for its backlight over the 3310's green.
Re: I'll See Your 33xx and Lower You
According to Wikipedia, the 3210 reached 160 million, while the 3310 only managed a paltry 126 million - it was even trounced by the Nokia 5230, which was Nokia's low-end touchscreen phone and racked up 150 million.
But these were all trounced by the tag-team efforts of Nokia's 1100 and 1110, which managed about 250 million apiece, or around half a billion in total...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_phones
I never subscribed to smart phones and still have my Nokia 5110...
... or rather, due to an ancient mistake in the order / shipping I have a crate full and have been using them ever since.
It has the same "OS" as the 3210 installed on it (so Snake 1) and thankfully still works.
My biggest worry is that the batteries in them naturally degrade in storage (They haven't been "activated" so believe I am safe on that front). I am also worried that the mobile phone radio standards change rendering them all deaf. Again, that doesn't seem to be the case with BT (O2) or Vodafone.
So, unless either of these two things break, I have enough of the things to last me at least a new one every year for my birthday. Annoyingly it is really the battery that will go (lasts about 2-3 years). The phones themselves are built like tanks.
I so hope these don't need to get sent to the landfill haha.
For a fleeting period, this bulky handset was the phone to have.
Bulky! Really? compared to most modern smartphones it's tiny. OK yes it's thicker, but it's a lot, lot smaller in width and height.
Slapped wrist to whoever wrote the caption for the photograph!