Yahoo News The new Nokia 3310 is pure nostalgia - but should you swap your iPhone for it?
It'a a Saturday afternoon, I’m on the bus and I’m not scrolling through Twitter.
I’m still looking at my phone but I’m playing Snake because I’m trying a revamped Nokia 3310. The dumb phone comeback started with Rihanna and her flip phone in 2015.
Since then, appetite has risen for mobiles that eschew the bells and whistles of constantly connected devices for the stripped-down basics.
Nokia has rejuvenated the much-loved 3310 from the year 2000 with a few updates and a low price of just £49.99.
It could be the perfect phone for those with smartphone fatigue or going to a festival and requiring strong and stable battery life. In this spirit I ditched my iPhone 7 Plus for a week and stepped back to the start of the millennium to try the simple life — but can you hack it in London without wi-fi?
Here’s how it measures up.
On message
Messaging has totally changed in the smartphone era — qwerty keyboards are the norm now and autocorrect does half the work for you — so going back to the multiple button-presses of traditional texting proved tricky.
Typing takes forever, and the predictive text is laborious. I spent five minutes trying to text my partner that I was in Uniqlo, but had left the shop before I’d finished writing it.
Still, it all contributes to a slower pace of life — it’s so much more effort to text that you only do it when you really need to, and you’ll use your mobile more economically.
It could even make your friends less flaky — if they know texting is this much effort they might stick to the original plan. Txt spk could make a comeback because it is just easier, especially if you go extra-retro with a pay-as-you-go SIM where every text counts.
Game on
Nokia couldn’t revive the 3310 without including its most iconic game. Snake is indeed back, but there have been a few tweaks.
There’s a new challenge-based play mode where you have to complete a series of timed objectives, but luckily the separate “survival” mode is far more like Snake 2.
The gameplay is faster and there are new elements — bombs to avoid, magnets to attract nearby apples, and scissors to trim your length in a crisis.
As it is the only distraction on the handset I quickly became consumed by it — just like I did on the original 3310. The difficulty threshold is high though — a score of 70 apples proved my best. When I go back to my iPhone I’ll be downloading the Snake app.
In charge
Battery life is where the Nokia 3310 trumps every other phone. It has serious staying power.
Over the course of a week I only charged the thing once for about two hours — and the charge port is now a standard USB input, meaning it will fit all those random cables that you have strewn around your home.
Despite sending plenty of texts, making several calls, and playing hours of Snake, the 3310 had remarkable stamina.
Make a connection
The 3310 is internet-enabled but it won’t connect to wi-fi and the connectivity is only 2.5G — a crawl compared to 4G. Of course, if you’re switching to the Nokia 3310 you’re likely doing so to disconnect from the internet’s perpetual thrum — and there are no pinging social notifications here.
The Opera web browser provides a basic lifeline to Gmail, Facebook or BBC News in a low-res format when the time really calls for it, but when I tried looking up Vue Piccadilly’s film times at the weekend all that loaded was a fully black screen.
Camera action
You’re not buying the Nokia 3310 for its camera. The lens shoots in 2MP and requires a steady hand to capture anything more than a yellowy blur.
I snapped one photo of my colleague to use as wallpaper and didn’t bother after that. Still, it’s ideal for a break if you often find yourself living for the likes on Instagram.
