New Nokia 3210: not the phone I remember

It’s the early 2000s and a young man in his first year at university realizes he’s left his creaky old Nokia 5110 on the train. Since you just started a new relationship, this is seen as a disaster, even in such backward times before social media.

Awash in cash (well, credit) from his rapidly dwindling student loan, he rushes to the nearest Vodafone store and signs up for their latest and greatest mobile phone: the Nokia 3210. And so a whole new relationship is born, a which eventually led him to write about mobile technology for a living.

Dear Reader, We’re taking this self-indulgent trip down memory lane, because HMD has just released a new and updated version of the Nokia 3210. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, so here’s how it compares to one of my favorite phones ever.

Do I know you?

While a quarter of a century in, well, anything is a long time, it’s not hard to remember what made the original Nokia 3210 so special. It has set itself up for future Hall of Fame status through an old-fashioned, convenient 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 with an internal antenna, creating an instantly iconic, sleek outline that has essentially continued into the current smartphone era, albeit via a significant smoothing process.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

The first and perhaps most relevant thing to note is that taking the new Nokia 3210 out of the box did not evoke any sense of nostalgia for me at all. Memories can be tricky to pin down, of course, but there was only a vague sense of familiarity here.

That’s because HMD, the Finnish manufacturer that makes phones under the Nokia license, has not actually released a new Nokia 3210 at all. It has launched yet another new Nokia phone in its extensive range of Nokia phone phones.

That’s right, you can still buy brand new Nokia dumb phones, and have been for years – the Nokia 3310 got the same treatment five years ago. This Nokia 3210 is not so much a blast from the past, but more a matter of ‘business as usual’.

You’ve changed, man

A Google image search for the old Nokia 3210 confirms that my memory has not completely failed me. The two phones look very different from all angles.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

The physical keyboard has the same layout, but above that there’s a new directional pad with a central selection button instead of the original’s single central button. There are also dedicated call and end buttons, each accompanied by two contextual menu buttons, rather than a ‘C’ button and an up and down navigation button.

There’s a new provision of a 3.5mm headphone jack at the top of the phone which, along with Bluetooth support, reflects its potential to double as an MP3 player – something the original wasn’t capable of. However, with only 128 MB of storage space, you don’t have much room for music files – not without inserting a microSD card into the hybrid second SIM slot.

Another even more modern version is a USB-C slot on the bottom of the phone for charging with the included brick and for data transfer. As with all these phones with simple features, you can count standby time in days, not hours.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

The new phone leaves a similarly sized ‘candy bar’ footprint, but is around 40% thinner and lighter than its chunky predecessor.

One of the quirky, youth-oriented features of the original 3210 was its interchangeable faceplates, which allowed you to customize the phone’s appearance. Unfortunately, no such facility exists here.

Eye for sore eyes

Another important element that is completely different from the original Nokia 3210 is the screen. It’s a fundamentally different beast here, in line with modern feature phones that are still marketed to older users and those embarking on a smartphone detox.

Out comes the small 1.5-inch monochrome backlit LCD screen of the original, and in comes a 2.4-inch TFT screen. It has a much larger aspect ratio, a much sharper QVGA resolution, greater brightness and of course true colors.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

It won’t give any vaguely modern smartphone a run for its money, but it’s certainly more pleasant to fire off texts than with the monochrome original.

Turn the phone over and there’s another element that speaks to the modern age. There’s a tiny camera module, something that wasn’t present on the original Nokia 3210.

I actually wish HMD hadn’t bothered about it. The quality of the images captured by this measly 2Mp sensor is downright terrible. There’s a flash here, but really you shouldn’t even consider taking photos in less than optimal lighting.

Something old, something new

Returning to that screen, it is necessary to use Nokia’s Series 30+ operating system. This is a feature phone operating system that traces its heritage back to 2013, but it’s still far more advanced than the Series 20 user interface of the original Nokia 3210.

The home screen shows a rudimentary 3×3 grid of app icons that will be common to a modern, smartphone-savvy audience. There’s an FM radio app, which is quite strange, as well as icons for basic functions like Alarm, Messages and Contacts.

Navigating the Settings menu is quite an ordeal, as I discovered when I tried to mute the hideous noises that accompany each press of the D-pad.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

The only references to internet connectivity here come from dedicated Facebook and Opera Mini browser apps. Browsing the internet on the latter is an exercise in pain, even with access to 4G network speeds. There is no Wi-Fi facility whatsoever.

Besides that low-resolution non-touch display, a lot of that sub-optimal web performance (to say the least) comes down to the humble Unisoc T107 chip running the show here, as well as a minuscule 64MB of RAM. We often forget how capable even the cheapest smartphone is these days, but phones like this are a stark reminder.

Of course, surfing the web is about the most intensive thing you can do on the new Nokia 3210, without access to modern applications. There are a number of games pre-installed, but they are quite old-fashioned.

It has Snake, just like the original Nokia 3210, but also trials of Doodle Jump and a much simplified Crossy Road. You can buy the full games, but would you really want to in an age where many more advanced smartphone games are completely free and where you can play a full version of Resident Evil 4 Remake on a small smartphone?

I had such high expectations…

It actually makes a lot of sense to revive the Nokia 3210. Yes, there is the usual ingrained market of nostalgic thirty- and forty-somethings looking back on simpler times. But there is also a part of the younger generation that wants to take a break from the constant distraction that smartphones now offer by buying simple phones (also called dumb phones).

The new Nokia 3210 certainly has potential for this last group of people, with its lack of app access and limited online options. But in that sense it doesn’t really offer anything that wasn’t always available. The truth is that feature phones never really went away, and you can buy a phone that offers the same basic features for even less than the £74.99 asking price of the Nokia 3210.

As for that nostalgic crowd, I don’t think the Nokia 3210 serves them particularly well either. Apart from a very vague physical resemblance, this new Nokia 3210 looks nothing like its predecessor. The key layout is different, the large color screen is a completely different prospect, and the operating system is from a different era entirely – although still quite limited.

As a stripped-down feature phone for modern people who want a compact device for calling and texting, the new Nokia 3210 is just fine. However, it’s not a phone my Y2K teenage self would have recognized.