The Nokia 3310 is 20 years old

September 3, 2020 11:11 AM

The Nokia 3310 was unveiled on September 1, 2000. Famously rugged, with seemingly infinite battery life, swappable casings and Snake II, it was special.
posted by Cardinal Fang (36 comments total)

I had one (or more precisely, a slight variation called the Nokia 3360) for a while. I loved it, I think more so than any phone I've owned before or since. It was easily pocketable, very durable, did what it was supposed to and did it very well.
posted by splitpeasoup at 11:24 AM on September 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

The Saul Goodman signature series.

Excellent phone, back in the days when paging was expensive my workgroup had a single Nokia we handed off for production rotation.
posted by lon_star at 11:34 AM on September 3, 2020

I still have one somewhere.
posted by RandomInconsistencies at 12:04 PM on September 3, 2020

That was my second phone — my first was a short-lived piece of junk that a coworker donated to me.

I have watched plenty of streaming video services on my iPhone, had video calls with faraway relatives whom I do not see in the flesh for years on end, and played many games with strategic depth and graphics rendering that would boggle my circa-2000 eyes. But Snake II is still the best.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:05 PM on September 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

It was a freezing November day in 2000 in Manhattan when, after taking the day off to wait for a tech who never came, I walked back to the pay phone on the corner for the third time, told the Verizon rep to go fuck themselves, marched in to the nearest cell provider store and walked out with a solidly badass Nokia 5190. Not as fancy as the svelte, sexy 3310, but I know which phone I'd rather have in a fight.
posted by phooky at 12:29 PM on September 3, 2020 [5 favorites]

I had one and loved it - it was exactly like the "grey, Orange-branded" one on the wikipedia page. I know people who to this day still refer to Christmas as "wobs" because that's what its T9 predictive text suggested if you hit the keys for "xmas".
posted by doop at 12:55 PM on September 3, 2020 [4 favorites]

Yeah, I had one, in red. I remember one month I racked up an $800 roaming bill calling my intended during a long road trip. I was angry, but I paid it.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:35 PM on September 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

Funny to read a non-American-centric tech article for once. Being a GSM phone we didn't really see the 3310 in the US. We did see the very similar Nokia 3360 though, I definitely had one for awhile.
posted by Nelson at 1:57 PM on September 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

I had a spate of Nokia phones, up till 3G came along and I wound up on a Sony Ericsson T68i. I remember being in awe at looking at very basic websites for information. I miss the multi-day battery life and snap on covers that let you change colors on the fly. I wonder if my thumb still knows how to T9 by touch so I can keep my eyes up in the classroom...
posted by msbutah at 2:21 PM on September 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

‘Unbreakable’ does no justice to these things. I had one, and was mugged for it one evening, three kids with a knife between them. I gave it up without argument just like you’re supposed to, and had a typically NSW Police front desk experience reporting the event (‘so were they Aboriginal?’ ‘Uh’). I got a new phone and forgot all about it. Then about three years later I got a phone call from a detective to say, Mr da Gama, we have your phone can you please come in to pick it up? They had me look at a book of mug shots—all young white men, none of whom I had ever seen in my life—and though they wouldn’t tell me anything it seems the phone was part of some kind of serious criminal enterprise. I signed for my phone, deleted the atrocious techno ringtones, bought a clean new cover, and used it for years after. By that time it was obsolete but I didn’t care, how many people can say they got a stolen phone back, and working?
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 2:37 PM on September 3, 2020 [22 favorites]

msbutah: I had a spate of Nokia phones, up till 3G came along and I wound up on a Sony Ericsson T68i.

I'm still using a Sony Ericsson candybar phone. Just got a new one - well, new to me - off of Ebay in order to deal with the imminent phaseout of 2G in Canada. Hopefully it'll last me until 3G phaseout in 2025.

Weird flex, I know.
posted by clawsoon at 3:20 PM on September 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

my first cellphone was a Nokia 2210i. god, i loved that phone. i used it until the first cameraphones came out, when i switched to Samsung. since then, i've pretty much stuck with Samsung in some form or another, save for a short flirtation with a Motorola. but i still think back on that little Nokia with great affection and respect. i probably still have it in storage, at the bottom of some box of electrical junk.
posted by lapolla at 6:35 PM on September 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

actually, i take that back - it's been a hell of a long time, and i had to google until i found a photo of the right model. but the numbers didn't seem quite right. kept looking, came across the Nokia Museum website - what a delight! and confirmed, the my forst model was actually a 2170
posted by lapolla at 6:44 PM on September 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

I love these and picked up a similar one at a flea market a couple of years ago to pop my SIM card in when I wanted to be free of my iPhone but I could still get texts if I needed to meet up with someone. It says 1036 but I looked that up and it seems to be the same model? It’s basically perfect.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 6:54 PM on September 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

Can’t remember if it was this one or not but I got something similar as my first phone when I started driving. No long after that my dad approached me, pretty pissed, about a huge phone bill where I’d racked up thousands of text messages- at that time you bought a certain number, and beyond that it was x cents/text. How the fuck do you send 3000 texts??? I remember him asking. I told him, dad this is how you talk to girls now. He was quiet for a minute and then goes, we’ll get the unlimited plan.
posted by stinkfoot at 8:08 PM on September 3, 2020 [14 favorites]

I still have one somewhere.

When you find it, the battery will still be at 40%.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 10:39 PM on September 3, 2020 [14 favorites]

I bought a 3210 for my girlfriend to help us navigate a long-distance relationship. It seems to have worked, as we've been married for 18 years now. Even if I got a 3310 (or 3330? I forget) later, the 3210 is still the king of phones in my heart.
posted by Harald74 at 11:40 PM on September 3, 2020 [5 favorites]

Nokia pushed out a retro-chic 3310 phone in Summer 2017 when I was looking to upgrade my down-to-25-mins-battery mobile. The young woman in the shop when I started looking said she'd bought one to take to a pop festival. That simplified the decision making process: a 3310 in lemon yellow was the only phone for me. But there was a supply bottle-neck and I had to wait 3 months for one to appear in the phone shop: nobody would accept a pre-order. Bonus! when it finally appeared, the line was marked down to €39.95. I must be the last person in the country to buy a new button phone as primary [only] mobile. Then again I was the last person in the country to buy a new slide-rule when mine was stolen in 1973. And I must have gotten through at least €40 of credit in the last 3 years.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:15 AM on September 4, 2020

Funny to read a non-American-centric tech article for once. Being a GSM phone we didn't really see the 3310 in the US. We did see the very similar Nokia 3360 though, I definitely had one for awhile.

Here's a thread of the time, discussing why Nokia didn't (or chose not to) pursue a major market share in the US.

(tl;dr: 1. the CDMA market was large but fragmented; 2. unlike GSM, the CDMA model effectively put the network operators in charge of the market, rather than the phone manufacturers.)
posted by Cardinal Fang at 12:53 AM on September 4, 2020

I used the built-in thingy where you can program a song, with those squeeking sounds. And, naturally, it was that Slayer's most evil bit from Raining Blood that I programmed in. Then I gave it to a good friend of mine, a fashion artist mostly doing children's clothing. I think that was her ringtone for years.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:49 AM on September 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

I lost one of these up the Pentland Hills just south of Edinburgh. 18 months later someone found it and got in touch with the first contact on it.

To survive 2 Scottish winters is quite impressive.
posted by gnuhavenpier at 4:17 AM on September 4, 2020 [4 favorites]

3210 for life!
posted by EndsOfInvention at 5:01 AM on September 4, 2020

My grandmother was still using my 3310 (bought in 2001) in 2016 as a backup when her more modern phone failed, until the keyboard finally gave out. Brilliant little thing.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 5:04 AM on September 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

It's funny, I don't think I had a phone after the Nokia. I moved to Canada and cancelled my account. Until I got my iPhone in the '10s.... sure was nice not having that monthly payment.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:24 AM on September 4, 2020

I remember one month I racked up an $800 roaming bill calling my intended during a long road trip. I was angry, but I paid it.

Likewise. I rethought my approach to long distance one month when my phone bill surpassed my rent.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:53 AM on September 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

I had giant f'ing bills, too, before digital service happened. Before that, I was on a fancy analog phone (Motorola Elite something or other - basically a sleeker riff on the PT550 flip phone), and was traveling a lot for work, so I'd routinely have bills from $750 to $1,000 by the time minute overages and roaming fees were factored in. (It was expensed; I never paid it out of pocket.)

Then digital cell phones became a thing, and I opted for a giant-ass super ugly Nokia (2110, maybe?). But the upside was that my bill then never topped like $110 again no matter how much I used it, no matter where I used it, and no matter where in the US I called. The only downside was that walking into Houston Cellular / AT&T stores no longer produced the sort of amazing sucking-up-to-the-high-roller behavior I'd grown to love. ("Coffee, Mr Uberchet? Scone?" -- but since the Nokia required attention so much less often than the Motorola, it was really a wash.)

Eventually I got the ubiquitous bullet-shaped Nokia everyone had in those days (mostly pushed as part of AT&T's "OneRate" package), and carried it for a long time until I got a shiny little chrome Nokia that was the "status symbol" phone of the era (no antenna bulge)! I think it was an 8810.

(I tried at one point to document what phones I'd had, but honestly it gets fuzzy before about 2004.)
posted by uberchet at 7:15 AM on September 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

I had one as my last phone in Scotland before we left for Canada. Fully expected to be able to find a replacement there, but no, back in 2002 we had to pay more for phones with fewer features in Canada because, well, Canada. For a while people knew it was me trying to reach them as I was the only person using texts. It got so many calls back from people saying "I don't know how to reply, so I called you."

I recently found a roughly 2005-vintage flip phone while clearing out. It had a small round mirror next to its 0.3 Mpx camera. Kids today would have no idea what that was for ...

The phone's 84x48 display lives on in many Arduino projects as the “Nokia 5110” LCD display. It's cheap and a bit rubbish, but works with almost everything.
posted by scruss at 9:58 AM on September 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

I commissioned this Nokia cake for my wife nonane a few years ago. I figured Nokia phones are a better symbol of permanence than diamonds.
posted by dmd at 11:01 AM on September 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

I ran one through the washer and then the dryer. The LCD screen was shot but the phone still worked.
posted by srboisvert at 11:17 AM on September 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

My first was the Nokia 5146 -- purchased shortly after Thanksgiving 1998. I had moved from Baltimore to New York in August of that year, and drove home to visit my family over Thanksgiving weekend. There was a big snowstorm, and we didn't get to Baltimore until like 1am. My wife strongly suggested that we stop at a payphone on the Turnpike to call my mother, because otherwise she'd be freaking out. I said no, she'll assume that we're delayed because of the snow.

Reader, my mother was not happy. Apparently, I could have been dead in a ditch.

We got Nokias shortly thereafter.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 12:46 PM on September 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

I too had a 3360. It was a fantastic, nearly industricible phone. I was a fantastic T9 typer.
posted by mmascolino at 2:01 PM on September 4, 2020

re: T9, I think because I am an Old (1970 births REPRESENT), and was a heavy user of email, I never actually texted anyone until I got a phone with a keyboard, which would've been ~ 2004 with a Treo, or maybe briefly with the horribly brain-dead Blackberry I had for a hot minute immediately before that.

I definitely never learned T9. I *did* have a Sidekick in ~2002, but as an adjunct to my actual phone. The messaging I did on it was all AIM.
posted by uberchet at 3:22 PM on September 4, 2020

I actually have one right next to me right now. I gave it to my two year old to play with, and unfortunately she managed to break the plastic case (she's really strong). I threw the battery away years ago so I have no idea if it still works, but it probably does.
posted by destrius at 7:45 AM on September 5, 2020

I had a Nokia 2115i. It was tiny, lightweight, durable, and positively sipped at its battery. When it eventually died there were no longer any candybar phones I could get from my carrier. So I replaced it with a used one of the same model that I got off ebay, and kept that one until I eventually switched to a iPhone around 2015.

Sometimes I miss the candybar though
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:35 PM on September 5, 2020

I had a Nokia 2115i. It was tiny, lightweight, durable, and positively sipped at its battery.

Same! We still have our original one, though it's not in service anymore; but we used it for over ten years. Best phone.
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:43 PM on September 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

> I recently found a roughly 2005-vintage flip phone while clearing out. It had a small round mirror next to its 0.3 Mpx camera. Kids today would have no idea what that was for ...

OK, kid these days. I'll bite: what was the mirror for? Aiming selfies?
posted by lostburner at 11:31 PM on September 6, 2020 [1 favorite]