Happy birthday to the Nokia 3310: 20 years ago, it seemed like almost everyone owned this legendary mobile It has been two decades since Nokia formally launched the iconic 3310 mobile phone, a device that instantly conjures nostalgia. For a fleeting period, this chunky 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 …
Motorola c520 to start (Spotted at a promo price of 65 quid as I drove into Exmouth), upgraded\passed over to the Mrs (Of the time) in favour of the Motorola M3288(e?).
Upgraded to the 6210i & then 6310i...which stood me in good stead right up to the N95 methinks.
Icon - Where is the damn thing now!
> 6310i - don't forget battery life! Although mine did start to deteriorate - I was charging it up every two weeks....
Two weeks? Tch.
I owned an Ericsson (pre-Sony-Ericsson) T39.
With the default ultra-slim battery, I think the battery life was 12 days. With a slightly thicker official battery, you could add another week to that. And if you transformed it into it's ultimate form with the chunky wideboy battery, it would comfortably last for a month.
Admittedly, it was nowhere near as indestructible as it's Nokia bretheren, but it did have a Star trek-style flippy bit, bluetooth, GPRS, and it worked in the USA. Oh, and it was smaller, to boot.
That wee beastie lasted me a good long while!
Yes, +1 for the 5110 (or PCS , 1800MHz equivalent (5120 maybe, it's been a while)) were de rigueur for early adopting 'pay as you go' types. The 3310 was a premium device. The 5110 and variants were the iconic 'you find them everywhere and they can't be destroyed' phone, at least here in Blighty
Best phone I ever had was a 5185. I'd still be using it if I were allowed, but after carrying it around quite happily for over 15 years, $TELCO decided it wasn't good enough for my needs and shut off cellular access for it. I still haven't found a worthy successor.
Over that 15+ years, it was stepped on by horses, gnawed on by sheep and puppies, run over by tractors, "cured" in the smokehouse overnight, left outdoors in the rain overnight a few times, dropped into toilets (three times), into a pot of boiling soup (twice) and into a bucket of used motor oil (once). When $TELCO forced me to retire it, it was still on its original battery, and didn't seem to function much different than the day it was new. I replaced the outer case and the "antenna" several times, and the screen twice.
Damn, I miss that phone!
Plus 1 for the 5110, this week my phone will mostly be wearing a red cover :)
I wonder if the 33xx was more the corporate hand out phone,istr lots of people had them as work phones at the time,so hence why they get remembered as iconic, whilst those of us paying for them ourselves went for the more stylish, and cheaper,options :)
Don't forget the 5110's changeable pop-off cases [1], available in a wide range of funky colours, Absolutely killer feature!
[1] For younglings: this was the phone's actual front panel casing, not a wrap around external case as you get for touchscreen smartphones.
Same. And they were absolutely bloody indestructible. I dropped mine in a mosh pit at a gig in Rock City back in the day. It spent the rest of the night getting kicked around the dance floor where it separated into 2 pieces - that is to say the battery, and the rest of it. Amazingly both bits were handed in at the bar and when I got them back at the end of the night all I had to do was attach the one to the other and it still worked perfectly.
I also had a 5110 and used to love playing Snake.
Had a lot of fun with all the 'extras' you could get for this phone - like different coloured fronts and even different coloured keypads.
I also had a couple of 'flashing' antennae that you could swap the standard black antenna for. They would flash when the phone was ringing and may have also stayed lit during the calls (can't really remember though).
I miss those days.
Back then, the biggest problem I saw with the 3330- and most likely why I didn't even consider getting it over the 3310- was that Internet access was by the minute at regular mobile call rates.
Apparently this was because it used circuit-switched data (effectively setting up a radio channel for a call, but using it for data instead) rather than the more advanced packet-based GPRS system.
Doubt it would have been much fun browsing the very few WAP sites available five lines at a time anyway...
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.
> the retrospective attention the 3310 gets over the 3210 is at odds with my memory of events
Snap! I thought almost exactly the same things as you in recent years.
I had a 3310, as it was the current model by that time, but I always preferred the look of the 3210 (#) and like you wondered why in recent years why it's the 3310 that became supposedly iconic.
I too remember the 3210 being the one that came first, a big deal at the time, and the "first" of that style that the 3310 was merely following up.
And like you I wondered if it was perhaps that the 3310 outsold the 3210? No; according to Wikipedia, the 3310 sold 126 million to the 3210's 160 million. Not a huge difference, same ballpark, but the 3210 was first.
I don't get it either.
(Note; the 3310 didn't feature a white backlight- it was green like the 3210's, at least in my one. I don't think white LEDs were common then.)
(#) The 3310's successor, the 3410 was in turn even less attractive. Wasn't a fan of that one.
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
True, but the 1100 and 1110 probably sold more because by that time it was possible to sell a phone like that cheaper than the (already affordable) 3210 and 3310. And they were intentionally as cheap as possible, being designed with developing countries in mind.
That said, for the same reason, they were probably the first phones many people in many of those countries had, which could arguably make them just as major landmarks (and for that reason, also possibly a source of nostalgia for even more people than the 3310 in the long term?)
Totally agree - it always surprises me when the 3310 is yet again hailed as some kind of landmark model.
It looks and feels like shoddy plastic junk compared to the quality feel of the 3210, too... naturally I still have my 3210 along with every mobile I've ever owned; this year I was forced onto my 4th in 20 years!
I had the 3210 as well (with the red Xpress-on cover!), and as I recall I set the unlock PIN to 2666 so that it would spell BOOM (3-2-1-0-BOOM, get it?). I also paid actual money to download the staccato-but-clearly-recognizable Slim Shady ring tone. Those were simpler times.
I agree... the 3210 was utterly ubiquitous, the 3310 was anm expensive upgrade (or a later entry first phone).
Although I still think that they 6210 is possibly the best phone of that era (I know it's several years later, but that's not so long when I look back)
I went back to candy bar phone a little while ago, a phone with BT tethering for 3G and a tablet which could use it was an excellent combination.
My 3210 took a LOT of abuse. To the point that the battery clip broke and wouldn't hold the battery in place properly. I wedged a bit of card in between the battery and the cover, which worked fine for another few years.
I still think that if Nokia had embraced android, they could've avoided the whole Microsoft fiasco and would still be the dominant player in the phone industry.
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.
Haha, a story very light on details went like this.
A dodgy and suspiciously well funded charity terrified of auditors fscked up and wanted it all gone. I got thanked in the process XD
Edit: I have a more detailed version of this story now in my undo buffer because I have just noticed your username and feel a little uneasy suddenly. Let the past be the past I always say. No need to dredge up old history.
Exactly what I was thinking. Modern phones are huge in comparison. They kept getting smaller for a while, peaking around the 8310, then started getting inexplicably bigger again, until shit like this started happening. I'm keeping my dumbphone. My pockets thank me.
(In a Crocodile Dundee voice) That's not a prison edition phone, this is a prison edition phone.
The flip-phone was the real winning format for pocketability. One of the last good ones was the Samsung E1150. They replaced it with the E1270, which was a flimsy, plasticky piece of shit, and then decided no-one wanted to buy flip phones any more. Now the only flip phones you can get seem to be off-brand toy phones marketed at your gran.
The 3310 was bulky compared to some of its (more expensive) peers.
Ericsson's T28 from 1999 was 15mm thick and weighed 83 grams, whilst the 3310 was 22mm thick and weighed 133 grams. The T28 was pricey, costing more than twice as much as bigger but otherwise similar Ericsson models.
How small a phone was became a status symbol for a while - hence the visual joke in the film Zoolander (2001) when the fashionista protagonist struggles to operate his matchbox-sized phone.
In a case of life imitating art, Nokia would go on to make a lipstick sized phone with no keypad - during Nokia's run-by-mangers (instead of engineers and designers), terminal decline era.
Ah the Nokia 7280. That's really a product of designers and engineers (both asking “how small can we make this?”) over management’s requirement to make something cheap. All the 7xxx phones were basically “screw it, we’re rich: go do something mad!”.
I knew someone who had one. It’s actually much easier to use than you think once you’ve got all your phonebook on the SIM (remember, this is from the days when your contacts and last ten SMS messages were stored on your SIM card). Entering your phonebook, though…
Real Crazy Finnish Design was the 7600 (a square/leaf-shaped phone with a screen in the middle and keypad buttons along the edge), or the 3600: for some reason this had the buttons arranged in a circle on a surface that would easily have accommodated a usable keypad.
The big thing about the 3310 was that it did not have an obvious aerial. does not seem to be a big thing now, but at the time it was revolutionary, since it meant the phone did not snag in packets and snap the thing off. Ericssons best at the time still had asmall but significant shark fin aerial.
The other big "innovation" was snap on covers which provided some customization. Again does not seem much now, but up to that point phones tended to be corporate black.
Oh, I remember doing that on the beach, I was trying to show off to my friends!
Had it tethered to my Ipaq 5450 and using a 9k6 internet connection, connected to an office server via RDP.
It was absolutely unusable, as both the speed, as well as the screen resolution were way, way too low, but I felt like a badass anyway.
I shudder to think about the utter lack of security awareness we had back then.
Have to agree. It just works. They're also pretty much indestructable. Mine was in such a sorry state after falling out of top pockets down flights of stairs, falling into sinks full of washing up and just generally being abused that it became a sort of office joke. Everyone was routing for it.
It still works. The battery isn't very good, but it still works just fine.
When I was in working on a pipeline project in Turkey it literally saved my sanity. In those days, one could stream BBC radio programmes using RealPlayer, which was really great at streaming with very low bandwidth requirements. It was perfectly possible to stream radio programmes using the 6310i as a modem (using the bluetooth connection) even with the 6310i's lowly GPRS modem. Worked a treat.
Great phone. And great car kit, too!
I wonder about that. If you mangle the config to be 2g only (not sure you can, can only see 2g/3g as an option), turn off mobile data, delete all the apps you can, turn off WiFi, that should basically be the best you can do. You could possibly turn on super power saving mode, too. My S7 currently lasts a day if I leave it doing nothing much beyond receiving emails, some web browsing, and rarely any calls.i suspect the os and screen are more power hungry than the old Nokia's.
In a prison somewhere near you, someone is probably unclenching to release one of these from its own fleshy confinement.
Your perception of it being small was a triumph of the design language rolled out in the 3210 - it made them look smaller than they were. Maybe the lack of an aerial bulge or knob helped. Both models were smaller than many of their contempories and forebears, but there had been far smaller and slimmer phones on the market for a couple of years, both from Nokia themselves and from Ericsson.
Yeah defo 3210 was the common one - before that I remember having a motorola - the M3788 or something, the one where if the batteries died you could pop out the rechargeable battery pack and put AAs in to keep you going.
Those things were unbelievable, I dropped it off a bridge onto a busy dual carriageway once, it gone run over by a couple of cars before I could safely retrieve it, and still worked...
These were the big, everyone had them phone as we hit Uni / College. (Well the 3210's anyway)
We did notice that the vibrate function on them, when the phone was balanced to stand upright, was enough to propel the phone along a flat-ish table surface at a fair clip.
Being the enterprising students that we were, we were able to set up races between people. The covers gave a livery, and some of us (me) discovered some cheaper, lighter cases as well as what network was quickest to connect to what and kick off the phone.
Made a fair few bevvies out of that knowledge too...
(Icon related...)
On a slightly different note, I remember when the Nokia 7650 came out, and I got my paws on one. If memory serves me correctly, this was the first consumer mobile phone with an integrated camera (The Sony Ericsson T10i had a camera module add on but not many people had it).
I distinctly remember taking photos on nights out and people being in complete awe of the fact my phone had a camera built in, and a reasonably decent one (for the time) at that. I also had an infrared TV remote control app, much fun in bars and pubs. Also, you could record short video clips in a terrible resolution by installing an obscure German T-Mobile java app.
The phone had just 4MB memory but it was easy to move photos to my PC using Bluetooth to free up memory.
Of course now NOT having a camera on your phone is the strange thing...
But what about Bruce Schneier?
I had an Analogue Nokia Mobile. I had then some other Nokia for a while and then I got the N9110 in Jan 2000 and the N9210i some time in 2002, about the same time as my third laptop. Both were real smart phones, better than 1st Apple which was GSM only, I had a Nokia E65 when the first iPhone came out. I'm on my fourth laptop now, nearly 2 years. Old. I left the job that supplied the N9210i and had half a dozen rubbish phones before a Sony-Ericsson Xperia, maybe the last joint branded one. It still sort of goes, but I use a generic style 6" Alcatel/TCL now, not sure if it does 4G. I'll not bother upgrading especially for 5G.
Most of the so called Smart Meters in UK and Ireland and many burglar alarms are GSM only. So I wonder exactly what is happening?
SOGA says goods like a phone should work for 2 years. Yet local shops are still selling cheap GSM only phones. Some are dual sim and old Nokia styled but with SD card space inside, FM Radio and MP3 player as a well as the snake game and interchangeable battery.
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