Nokia 3310 Review

The 3310 was the 3210 with the rough edges filed off, and that is the whole secret. Nokia kept the internal antenna, the Xpress-on covers, T9 and Snake, and added the things people were actually doing with phones in 2000: a chat mode that threaded SMS into a conversation, long messages that stitched three texts into 459 characters, a stopwatch, a calculator, a ringtone composer. The 84 by 48 pixel screen and the Series 20 menu were the ones every Nokia owner already knew, which was the point.

The BMC-3 nickel-metal-hydride cell held 900 mAh and, with nothing on board to drain it, ran for the better part of a week; Nokia quoted up to 260 hours of standby and was not exaggerating. There was no camera and no colour, and in 2000 nobody missed either, so the camera grade records an absence its year did not punish, not a failure. The indestructible legend arrived a decade later, from the internet.

In 2001 it was simply a 133 gram slab of plastic that bounced when dropped, whose keypad mat wore shiny and whose NiMH pack sagged after two years of charging. That is still an A: it was the best-built phone in its price band, it sold 126 million times, and it never once asked for an update. Nokia never sold the 3310 in the US (the 3390 was its GSM 1900 cousin), so the price above is its European SIM-free price, roughly 150 dollars at the time.