Nokia 3310
Three pages of highlights from the world’s biggest launchpad for phones and tablets. Members of our reviews team share their first impressions
Nokia 3310 The 3310 is back, but is it anything other than a nostalgic curiosity?
Let’s all meet up in the year 2000,” Jarvis Cocker sang back in 1995. If Cocker and his Pulp buddies had eventually managed this millennium meet-up, chances are it would have been arranged using a Nokia 3310 between games of Snake.
If that last paragraph gave you pangs of nostalgic joy, then you’re exactly the kind of person Nokia is hoping to lure back into its fold. And the marketing has worked, with Carphone Warehouse reporting record levels of enquiries about this phone. So, how good is it?
Let’s be clear: this is a feature phone, not a smartphone. There’s no touchscreen, no Wi-Fi, no 4G and no app store. That’s not to say that you should just start searching for old Nokia phones on eBay instead – this isn’t the 2000 model reboxed. For starters, you’ve got a camera on the back now! True, it’s only a 2-megapixel affair, but that’s better than the zero-megapixel snapper of the original.
That leads us neatly onto the 3310’s second big upgrade: a colour screen. True, the 2.4in, 240 x 320 screen is bested by even the cheapest of smartphones, but it’s a world away from the 1.5in monochrome display you were squinting at during The Bill’s ad break.
It also has somewhere to keep all those 2-megapixel shots you’ll start racking up: a microSD slot, with a 32GB capacity. That, combined with the headphone jack, means it doubles up as a capable MP3 player when you’re on the move.
But the real ace up the Nokia 3310’s sleeve is the claimed battery life. While nowadays we celebrate a handset breaking the 24-hour mark as if it’s a Nobel Prizewinning innovation, the Nokia 3310 smashes that, going for 30 days on standby, or 22 hours of solid talk time.
And yes, Snake is back. It’s undergone a graphical spruce up for the new colour screen, but it’s as addictive as ever. Muscle memory will kick in very quickly, believe me.
One thing that hasn’t returned is the custom faceplates. You’re stuck with Nokia’s choice of colours this time around. That’s orange and yellow or grey and blue.
I remain sceptical as to whether all the buzz around the Nokia 3310 will translate into huge sales – it’s not as if feature phones ever went away, it’s just that far fewer people buy them, despite their battery life. All the same, this is a well-judged upgrade of a handset that still gets people mistyeyed 17 years later, and as a backup phone (or if you need to buy a cheap, easy-to-use phone for family members), its price of £49 may just be tempting enough.