Nokia 1100 Review

Nokia designed the 1100 for places where the phone would be the household's only computer and the dust would get into everything. Dimitre Mehandjiysky's case has non-slip grips down the sides and a keypad sealed as a single membrane, and the whole thing weighs 86 grams. The 96 by 65 pixel monochrome STN screen is nothing to look at but it reads in full sun, which matters more in Lagos or Lucknow than colour does.

The BL-5C cell holds 850 mAh, and because the Series 30 software asks so little of it, Nokia's 400 hour standby claim turned into real weeks between charges. Hold the C key and the LED in the top edge becomes a torch, a feature aimed squarely at places where the power goes out. Snake II and Space Impact+ are on board; a camera, Java and WAP are not, and at this price in 2003 nobody expected them, so the camera grade records an absence rather than a fault.

It aged into an oddity: in 2009 certain batches from Nokia's Bochum plant were found to carry firmware that let a reprogrammed handset receive another number's texts, and reports of buyers paying tens of thousands of dollars for a single unit made the news. Over 250 million were sold before it was retired in 2010. It launched at around 100 euros in Europe and the price fell fast, so the figure above is a rounded conversion. Judged for what it set out to be, there is nothing to take off.