Do I really need a… Retro tech product?

What does it do?

Despite – or perhaps because of – the breakneck pace of change, there’s a growing market for gadgets that push the envelope right back to where it was 10, 20 or even 50 years ago. At February’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, thehe latest handheld devices were overshadowed by the Nokia 3310 (pictured), a re-issue of a button-based phone from 2000.

Why would I want it?

In the case of the 3310, we’re not quite sure, but we’ll be testing it soon. The general theme of retro tech is that it feels more ‘real’. It’s partly about the way analogue tech represents the world more directly than digital: vinyl records have come back into fashion because people think they sound better than CDS. But it’s even more about pushing buttons and pulling levers made for a specific job, instead of just tapping and swiping everything. While smartphones take increasingly good pictures, enthusiasts still pay a lot of money for digital cameras that provide similar controls to film cameras – and some are even going back to film.

What’s the catch?

Progress is progress: retro products may offer fewer features, take more effort to use, and in many cases do their job worse.

So can I do without it?

At the moment, retro seems like a fad. But it’s true that today’s touchscreen interfaces fail to exploit all our natural senses and skills. People doing specialised jobs, from media production to surgery, add dedicated physical equipment to their computers. So maybe in the next decade we’ll all have thoroughly modern tech with old-fashioned knobs to twiddle.