New Nokia 3210: it’s not the phone I remember

It’s the early 2000s, and a young man in his first year of university realizes that he left his old, creaky Nokia 5110 on the train. Starting a new relationship is considered a disaster, even in such dark, pre-social media times.

Filled with 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 thus a whole new relationship is ignited, 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, updated version of the Nokia 3210. I’ve been using it for a few weeks, so here’s how it compares to one of my favorite phones.

I know you?

Although a quarter of a century is a long time, it’s not difficult to remember what made the original Nokia 3210 so special. It set itself up for future Hall of Fame status with some good old-fashioned clever design.

This thing was unlike anything else on the market at the time, even making Neo’s Nokia 8110 feel like a clunky gadget (come at me). It was the first phone with an internal antenna, creating an instantly iconic sleek outline that has essentially carried over into today’s smartphone era, albeit through a significant flattening 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 completely failed to elicit any feelings of nostalgia in me. Memories can of course be difficult things to pin down, but there was only a vague sense of familiarity here.

Indeed, HMD, the Finnish manufacturer that makes Nokia-licensed phones, hasn’t actually released a new Nokia 3210. It has launched another new Nokia feature phone in its vast lineup of Nokia feature phones.

That’s right, you can still buy stupid new Nokia phones, and have 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 the status quo.

You’ve changed, man

Performing a Google image search on the old Nokia 3210 confirms that my memory capabilities haven’t completely abandoned me. The two phones are very different from every angle.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

The physical keyboard has the same layout, but above it there’s a new directional pad with a central select button in place of the original’s solitary central button. There are also dedicated call and end buttons, each joined by two context menu buttons, rather than a “C” button and an up and down navigation toggle.

There’s the new provision of a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top of the phone which, coupled with Bluetooth support, reflects its potential to serve as an MP3 player – something the original was incapable of doing. However, with only 128MB of storage, you won’t have much space for music files – not without inserting a microSD card into the second hybrid SIM slot.

Another even more modern touch is a USB-C slot on the bottom of the phone for charging with the bundled brick, as well as for data transfer. As is the case with all these simple feature phones, 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 candybar footprint, but it’s about 40% thinner and lighter than its chunky predecessor.

One of the quirky, younger features of the original 3210 was its interchangeable faceplates, which allowed you to customize the look of the phone. Unfortunately, no such provision exists here.

Pleasure for the eyes

Another key element that is completely different from the original Nokia 3210 is the screen. This is a fundamentally different beast, in line with modern feature phones that continue to be sold to older users and those embarking on a smartphone detox.

Then the small 1.5-inch backlit monochrome LCD screen of the original disappears and a 2.4-inch TFT screen appears. It has a much higher aspect ratio, much sharper QVGA resolution, greater brightness and of course true colors.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

It won’t give a vaguely modern smartphone a chance, but it’s certainly nicer to send texts to than the monochrome original.

Flip the phone over and there’s another item that speaks to modern times. There’s a tiny single camera module, which wasn’t something the original Nokia 3210 featured.

I kind of wish HMD wouldn’t have cared about this. The quality of images captured by this meager 2Mp sensor is simply terrible. There’s a flash here, but you shouldn’t even consider taking photos in less than optimal lighting.

Something old, something new

To return to this screen, it is necessary to run the Nokia Series 30+ operating system. It’s a general-purpose phone operating system that can trace its heritage back to 2013, but it’s still far more advanced than the original Nokia 3210’s Series 20 UI.

The home screen displays a rudimentary 3×3 grid of app icons that will be largely familiar to a modern smartphone-savvy audience. There’s a pretty quaint FM radio app, as well as icons for basic functions like alarm, messages and contacts.

Navigating the Settings menu is a bit of an ordeal, as I discovered when I tried to turn off the hideous boinks that accompany each of your D-pad presses.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

The only nods to Internet connectivity here come from the dedicated Facebook and Opera Mini browser apps. Surfing the web on the latter is a painful exercise, even with access to 4G network speeds. There is no Wi-Fi provision.

Besides that low-resolution non-touch screen, much of that sub-optimal (to put it mildly) web performance comes down to the humble Unisoc T107 chip running the show here, along with a miniscule 64MB of RAM . We can often forget how well even the cheapest smartphone is capable of performing these days, but phones like this are a cruel reminder.

Of course, web browsing is the most intensive activity you can do on the new Nokia 3210, without access to modern apps. Some games come preinstalled, but they’re really old-school.

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

I had such high hopes…

Reviving the Nokia 3210 actually makes a lot of sense. Yes, there is the usual market of nostalgic 30- and 40-year-olds returning to simpler times. But there is also a section of the younger generation that is looking to take a break from the constant distraction that smartphones now provide by getting basic phones (aka stupid phones).

The new Nokia 3210 certainly has potential for the latter group of people, with its lack of app access and limited online capabilities. But in that sense it doesn’t really offer something that hasn’t always been available. The truth is that feature phones never really went away and you can buy a phone that does the same basic things for even less than the Nokia 3210’s £74.99 asking price.

As for those nostalgic people, I don’t think the Nokia 3210 serves them particularly well either. Beyond a very vague physical resemblance, this new Nokia 3210 really has nothing to do with its predecessor. The button layout is different, the large color screen is a totally distinct perspective, and the operating system is from a totally different era, although it’s still quite limited.

As a sleek feature phone for modern people who want a compact device for calls and texts, the new Nokia 3210 fits the bill. However, it’s not a phone that my teenager from the year 2000 would have recognized.