At this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the crowd was among the first group of people to hear confirmation of rumours that have been flying around for a while: the compact, push-button Nokia 3310 cellphone is back.
This turn-of-the-century icon was known for its robust nature, long battery life and often garish shell. Launched in 2000, 126 million were sold, putting the model in the top 20 bestselling phones of all time. “It has Snake*,” Arto Nummela, CEO of the Finnish firm selling the phone, buoyantly affirmed, to garrulous whoops from the audience. (*A basic game.)
For something predicated on progress, technology is strangely preoccupied with the past.
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Technostalgia is becoming an increasingly pronounced conceit, with the recent past quickly commodified: , and allow fans to reminisce about 1990s hardware. Why do we imbue erstwhile technology with a misty-eyed romanticism that we deem lacking in contemporary counterparts?
The Nokia 3310 seems particularly emblematic of this phenomenon. It was released at the dawn of a new millennium that had long symbolised “the future”, in a year that also saw a host of other iconic technologies and devices reach us, including the PlayStation 2 games console, the Windows 2000 operating system, precision GPS for cars and the Jabra Bluetooth earpiece.
These were technologies that telegraphed progress and sophistication, and made life easier – and for which the fundamentals remain compelling and usable today. What’s more, they were no longer a rarefied privilege, but infiltrated ordinary households and lives.
I bear witness to that. The Nokia 3310 was my first phone. I had it on a pay-as-you go SIM card, using it to ring my parents when I needed a lift home and texting a small handful of friends who owned mobiles. I was a Snake devotee.
Sense of freedom
Looking back, the phone enabled a sense of autonomy I hadn’t experienced before: it afforded my first interactions with a device of my own. It also offered what felt like a boundless capacity for personalisation and self-expression. My bespoke cover of choice was a bright green background overlaid with sunflowers.
I spent what may well have been hours choosing the ringtone, opting for a . However, the stark difference between my Nokia 3310 and my current iPhone 6 is not its kitschy aesthetic or durability, but my relationship with it.
I never had to place my 3310 in a separate room to sit still enough to read a book, and cannot imagine blistering rows with partners for spending too much time on Snake. It feels telling that such a device is being sentimentalised at a moment when digital detoxes are big business and Apple has developed modes of filtering out blue light from screens to enable normal melatonin production.
But before you part with your £40 for the new Nokia, remember this: nostalgia can be a dangerous thing, bolstering the positive, eradicating the negative and falsely idealising the past. Like the sepia-tinged Instagram filter that dulls out the edges of photos, everything looks better through that lens.
