With a lack of familiarity coupled with limited functionality, it’s difficult to see who the Nokia 3210 will appeal to
It’s early 2000, and a young man in his first year of uni has realised that he has left his creaky old Nokia 5110 on the train. Having just started a new relationship, this is seen as a disaster, even in such benighted pre-social media times.
Flush with cash (well, credit) from his rapidly dwindling student loan, he rushes to the nearest Vodafone shop and signs up for their latest and greatest mobile phone: the Nokia 3210. And so a whole new relationship is kindled, one that would eventually lead him to write about mobile technology for a living.
We’re taking this self-indulgent trip down memory lane, dear reader, because HMD has just released a new and updated version of the Nokia 3210. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks, so here’s how it compares to one of my favourite ever phones.Do I know you?
While a quarter of a century is a long time in, well, anything really, it’s not hard to recall what made the original Nokia 3210 so special. It set itself up for future Hall of Fame status through good old-fashioned nifty design.
This thing looked like nothing else on the market at the time, making even Neo’s Nokia 8110 feel like the clunky gimmick it was (come at me). It was the first phone to feature an internal antenna, creating an instantly iconic clean outline that essentially carried through to today’s smartphone era, albeit via a significant flattening-out process.
The first and perhaps most pertinent thing to note is that pulling the new Nokia 3210 out of its box completely failed to evoke any sense of nostalgia in me. Memories can be tricky things to pin down of course, but there was only the vaguest sense of familiarity here.
That’s because HMD, the Finnish manufacturer that makes phones under the Nokia license, hasn’t really released a new Nokia 3210 at all. It’s released another new Nokia feature phone in its extensive Nokia feature phone range.
That’s right, you can still buy brand new Nokia dumb phones, and have been able to do so for years – the Nokia 3310 got the same treatment five years ago. This Nokia 3210 is less a blast from the past, and more a case of business as usual.You’ve changed, man
Performing a Google image search for the old Nokia 3210 confirms that my powers of recollection haven’t completely abandoned me. The two phones look quite different from all angles.
The physical keypad has the same layout, but above that there’s a new directional pad with a central selection button in place of the original’s solitary central button.
