Having a colorful exterior on a Nokia Lumia was pretty much a given in the good old days of Windows phone. Now that the brand is dead, I can’t help but reminisce how pretty those handsets looked.
This morning, I had an idea for an editorial along the lines of « I turned on my Nokia Lumia 630 Windows phone after seven years, here’s what still works ». I rummaged around in my cabinet drawers for around 15 minutes before I finally managed to locate it in a shopping bag containing old phones. I excitedly plugged it in, however, much to my disappointment, the phone’s display doesn’t turn on even though there’s a vibration when I plug in the charging cable. I do remember that Lumia phones showed the charging icon when you plugged them in, but there’s nothing on the display even after waiting for several minutes. Even pressing the power button doesn’t yield any response. So it’s definitely not completely dead, but it’s useless since it doesn’t turn on. I was a bit sad because that also meant that I had to bin my idea for an editorial which I was quite looking forward to, but as I tried different things to resuscitate my beloved Lumia 630, I also began to marvel at how pretty it looked, even compared to my primary, and relatively more high-end handset, the Samsung Galaxy A51. Although numerous OEMs have recently started to gravitate towards more colorful phones, it was arguably Nokia Lumia Windows phones which popularized this trend of having a noticeable (flashy?) and aesthetically pleasing exterior for the phone. Sure, people argued at that time that the polycarbonate shells that Nokia and Microsoft used were a cheaper option compared to the metal designs being used by more premium phones of that time, there was very little debate over how pretty they looked and how nice they felt to hold.
