The Nokia 3310 Was the Phone That Would Not Die

On September 1, 2000, Nokia announced a new mobile phone, and The Retrospectors record that it was launched at a boardsports event in Düsseldorf, Germany. It was not a flagship. It had a small monochrome screen, no camera and no internet. It was the Nokia 3310, and it went on to sell 126 million units, which put it among the most successful phones ever made.

The numbers are only half of why people remember it. The other half is a reputation. Long after it stopped being made, the 3310 was the phone that people joked could survive anything, the one that bounced when you dropped it and still had a charge at the end of the week.

Replacing a hit

The 3310 had a hard act to follow. Its predecessor, the Nokia 3210 of 1999, sold 160 million units by Silicon UK's count. The 3310 replaced it in the fourth quarter of 2000. According to Wikipedia's history of the phone, it was developed at Nokia's site in Copenhagen, Denmark.

It was a little smaller than the 3210, with a slightly rounded shell meant to sit in the palm and be worked with the thumb. The antenna was hidden inside. Inside was a Texas Instruments chip based on an ARM7TDMI core, running Nokia's Series 20 software, with more than 35 monophonic ringtones built in. The whole phone measured 113 by 48 by 22mm and weighed 133g. The specification was modest even for 2000, and the context matters. The Retrospectors point out that only about half of Americans had a mobile phone in their pocket at the time, and that the 3310 went on to sell more than 20 times as many units as the first iPhone.

By our arithmetic the 2017 model's battery is a fifth larger than the 1,000 mAh option on the original, and it has to drive a color screen with roughly nineteen times as many pixels.

What it actually did

The new feature Nokia was proudest of was Chat, a way of carrying on an instant-message style conversation over ordinary text messages. The 3310 could also send long messages of up to 459 characters, three times the length of a standard text. Silicon UK lists the small utilities, a calculator, a stopwatch, reminders, and a network monitor for anyone who wanted to see what the phone was doing.

Then there were the games. The 3310 came with Snake II, Space Impact, Bantumi and Pairs II. Snake II is the one people still bring up, and when the phone returned in 2017, reviewers' nostalgia for Snake was one of the most common threads in the coverage.

The phone was also built to be changed. Xpress-On covers clipped on and off, so the same 3310 could change color in a minute. That made an inexpensive phone feel personal.

The brick

Battery life was a large part of the legend. Silicon UK reports that a 3310 could last as long as a week on a single charge. With no color screen, no apps and no data to pull down, there was very little for the battery to do.

Durability was the rest. The 3310's sturdy casing often survived drops and rough handling, and the internet eventually turned that into a running joke about the indestructible Nokia brick. It became a symbol of a simpler kind of phone. In November 2015 it was even chosen as one of Finland's first three national emojis.

Mass production stopped in December 2005, and the last stock was sold by spring 2006. By then phones had cameras and color screens, and the 3310 looked like what it was, a very good phone from a different era.

The encore

Then it came back. On February 26, 2017, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, HMD Global, which was then making Nokia-branded phones, unveiled a new 3310 for €49. It kept the general shape and the idea and changed nearly everything else, with a 2.4 inch color screen, a 2 megapixel camera and a 1,200 mAh battery that HMD rated at up to 31 days on standby in its 2G version. Snake was back too, rebuilt by Gameloft as Snake Xenzia.

It was not a smartphone and did not try to be. Reviewers liked the battery life, the price and the toughness, and several pointed out that it could not do much that a modern user expects. By July 2017 HMD said it had sold out in many markets. A 3G version followed in October 2017 and a 4G model in China in early 2018.

What it still teaches

The 3310 is a reminder that a product can earn affection by doing a few things well and lasting a long time. It is the same reason people still talk about the Casio G-Shock and the Nintendo Game Boy. For the other pocket device that defined that decade, see our Apple iPod history, and for a phone maker trying to bring some of that character back, our story on Nothing and Carl Pei. More in tech history and industrial design.

The original 3310 never claimed to be the future. It was a phone that held a charge, played Snake and survived the floor, and it turned out that was enough to be remembered for twenty-six years.