Let’s go back to 1999: when the excitement toward the new millennium was at fever pitch. In March of that year, Nokia released what is arguably the most important phone ever made: the 3210. The indestructible little handheld came with the ability to quickly send text messages to your friends on its monochrome 84×48 pixel screen, call your parents to let them know you were to be picked up from the movies, and, while waiting, indulge in a quick game of Snake.
It doesn’t sound revolutionary now, but it really was. Before the Nokia 3210 launched, mobile phones were essentially made exclusively for business people – those who needed to contact their co-workers in a different city, state, or country, to talk about important™ things. Everyday people just talked in person, cold called one another, or just turned up at each other’s door steps. It was a wild time.
But Nokia’s little brick changed all that, and while it’s tempting to think that they had planned it all along, the truth is a bit messier than that.
Shoot forward to 2024, and the Nokia 3210 has been revived. This time, however, it’s looking to take things back to a simpler time, rather than push forward what a phone can be: part of the burgeoning ‘dumb’ phone movement. HMD, the maker of today’s 3210, calls it a ‘feature’ phone, rather than ‘dumb’, but I prefer to look at it through the rejection of today’s smartphone market and the ever-increasing level of digital fatigue spreading throughout today’s tech customer.
Either way, the 3210 did something different than what the majority of the phone industry was doing at the time – and while it’s a bit early to judge its latest effort, the first go around was a rousing success.
A Phone for the People
Born in Finland in 1979 as a paper-goods business, Nokia was instrumental in the formation of the ‘Nordic Mobile Telephone’ service, which eventually crystallised into what became known as 1G – as in, the first iteration of the 4G and 5G that currently power most cellular devices.
After launching the first car phone, the first actual ‘mobile’ phone (the Mobira Cityman), and experimenting with a whole bunch of different technologies, the design team at Nokia, led by Frank Nuovo, was left with a rare opportunity to redesign their previous attempt: the 5110.
See, back in the day, companies would launch new phones when they actually had something new to share with the world. We’ve gotten so used to major releases every year from the Apples and Googles of the world that the idea of sticking to one product at a time feels old-fashioned, but it meant every new launch was meaningful.
In 1997, Nokia found itself without any new technology to show off for the foreseeable future, and rather than just wait around for the boys in R&D to come up with a new idea, Nuovo challenged his team of designers to remake the 5110 for use by actual, everyday people. Something small and light enough to fit in someone’s pocket, but durable enough to survive being carted around everywhere, all day, every day.
Importantly, this gave the team at Nokia the time to improve upon the prior phone with new ideas like putting the antenna inside of the phone, rather than sticking out the top of the device, which made it far more pocketable. In all, the design process took two years but it was worth it.
The resulting product, the Nokia 3210, would go on to sell 160 million units worldwide, redefining modern handheld communication, but its greatest legacy would be at its users’ fingertips. The Nokia 3210 introduced the world to texting. While the technology that allowed the SMS technology to function had only been put in place in 1992, it hadn’t quite taken off. Business people preferred the immediacy of calling, and most regular people didn’t gravitate to mobile phones until the turn of the century.
One thing that made the 3210 especially conducive to texting was the T9 predictive text technology, where the 26 letters of the alphabet were spread across numbered keys to allow words to easily be spelled out without the need for a dedicated, QWERTY-style keypad – saving space and keeping the phone portable.
The other major selling point, and the one that arguably won Nokia the day, was the ability to replace your cover. Before the 3210, mobile phones were heavy, grey pieces of plastic that lacked any personality. The 3210, and its big brother, the 5110, had replaceable covers that allowed users to customise their phone. It’s a small thing, but it allowed everyone to showcase a little of their own personality through their phone (I remember cutting a square of cellophane out and putting it between the keypad and the lights within my own 3315, giving it even more of a ‘personal touch’. No one else at my school had red buttons, after all.)
This approach – viewing the phone as something that a customer would actually want to use, rather than have to use – completely changed the way phones are marketed, considered, and utilised.
Plus, it had Snake. We’re used to having as many games on our phones as we want, among many other distractions, but Snake was among the first, if not the first, way to waste hours upon hours staring at a tiny phone screen. It’s a game with the same addictive qualities as Tetris, the title that pushed the Game Boy to world domination just 10 years prior: easy to learn, but hard to master.
All of these things led the phone to be a massive hit, and its legend has only grown with time: Which is why it isn’t that surprising that HMD, another Finnish technology company that bought Nokia in 2016, is launching it all over again.
Take Two
Compared to its initial launch back in 1999, the re-release of the 3210 feels very different.
Rather than being an underdog launching an untested concept to the market, Nokia is bringing back one of its most classic models in a new context: betting on the growing relevance of dumb phones and ‘newstalgia’, a trend that takes something nostalgic and makes something new out of it.
HMD Australia’s general manager Brenden Folitarik says the original 3210 is “legendary” within the company, and is part of the business’ efforts to recognise the growing level of digital fatigue felt across the tech ecosystem.
“Digital fatigue is a trend that we’ve noticed, and we’ve seen that people want to go back to a simpler time (in tech) to escape that,” Folitarik tells me.
“We’ve seen (the uptake of) dumb phones actually increase year-on-year, and many of our customers are craving, as part of that, a step back to that ‘90s, nostalgic feel. What better phone to re-release than the 3210?”
It’s a fair question, but it’s important to note that the ‘new’ 3210 is quite different from the original. It’s much smaller for starters, and features a number of modernisations, such charging through USB-C, which aim to bring the convenience of 2024 tech while still limiting the overall functionality.
You have SMS and the ability to make and take calls, but the new phone also brings bluetooth, an incredibly basic camera, and a generic internet browser. In fact, there’s a few questionable inclusions on the new phone: a few extra games, such as Doodle Jump and Crossy Road, that you can play three times for free before needing to pay extra to get permanent access to.
The strangest inclusion to me, though, is a rudimentary Facebook app. I’m not sure who would want to check Facebook or update their status using a T9 keyboard, and the whole point of the phone is to detox from the modern world.
The goal, according to Folitarik, is to keep just enough access to the modern world to allow users to ‘detox’ from their daily lives online without cutting themselves off completely in an effort to combat digital fatigue.
According to a survey from Deloitte, 78 per cent of respondents have put at least one measure in place to set some digital boundaries already, usually by taking regular breaks from their screens, and limiting their notifications. But even then, there’s always the temptation to pick up your phone and swipe away.
It’s incredibly difficult to indulge in some doom scrolling first thing in the morning, however, when your phone is literally incapable of it.
“We want to be a force for good (and) want to encourage our customers to take micro detoxes, or a full detox (from their digital life),” Folitarik says.
And, within that context the new 3210 does its job. Folitarik himself switches to the phone on weekends in order to be more present with his family and friends, which is a more reasonable use-case for such a product than the expectation that someone would be able to simply quit their smartphone cold turkey.
And this really is the difficult part. There are more smartphones than we know what to do with these days, alongside a growing number of dumb phones vying for your attention. The biggest issue with making the switch a more basic, simple phone is that our lives are inextricably connected through so many different apps, which are, most likely, not available on such a device.
For better or worse it’s incredibly hard to survive in the modern world without ready access to the internet and its ability to connect you with people wherever you are, but at least there are more options every day to find ways to break free from its grip. Plus, you can still play Snake.
