For Christmas 2007, I got a MOTOFONE F3. It still works just fine – it’s the most minimal phone you can have. There seems to be a pretty good market for “festival phones” or the like as people attempt to get away from it all, and a phone that just places and receives calls, places and receives (rudimentary) text messages, and has speakerphone and an alarm – and that’s all – seems to be desirable to a lot of people who it turns out could have gotten it for maybe $30 a decade ago. But, as with so many things, time happened. And now only T-Mobile still supports GSM 2G networks, and not for very much longer.
Enter the Nokia 3310. The 2017 nostalgia phone has an update to quad band and 3G, so now it’s broadly feasible to have a simple phone that will continue to work after the plug gets pulled on the old networks – and will work around the world into the bargain, not least because this version is dual-SIM. (Not that I could go abroad without a smartphone, to be perfectly honest, but it’s the principle of the thing.) The original has sold out of all proportion to sense in the 900/1800 GSM world – with no 3G, no meaningful apps, a 2.4” display and technology that is the best 2006 could offer.
Why? More to the point, why would I throw $60 at this thing myself on a pre-order?
It’s aspirational, to be honest. Like the mechanical watch I wore abroad in place of the Apple Watch, it’s a touchstone of a time past – and maybe a time to come – when you don’t want or need social media, or GPS directions, or a steady stream of updates so you can watch the world burn in slow motion. It’s the means to keep in touch in a pinch, to text and say you’ll be late or call to hold a table, to snap a quick two-megapixel reminder of where you parked or what the address of the coffee place is. It’s a way of clinging to just enough technology to assist your life without letting it take over your life.
The truly ironic thing is that the only thing it really needs that it doesn’t have, at this point, is WhatsApp. Just because managing a group chat is so much easier without SMS, and for better or worse, WhatsApp – not Signal, not iMessage, not Facebook Messenger, certainly not any Google product – has become the de facto universal mobile messaging solution. Cross-platform, international, and it would be nice – but not utterly essential, thanks to the cunning use of Google Voice in a pinch. And then there’s Instagram…but then that’s opening the door to everything else too. The ironic thing is that Facebook owns both WhatsApp and Instagram, has largely left them alone, has managed not to screw them up – but it’s Facebook that has a built-in icon on the 3310, not its superior subsidiaries.
Honestly, this is all driven by the Irish experience. What apps did I legit need in Ireland? Maps, certainly, but that’s fair enough when you’re in a new town every night. WhatsApp to communicate with the traveling party. Instagram for people back in America to see how things were going. And really, that was about it. Almost no place took Apple Pay. There was precious little to be gained by checking email or RSS, it was just as easy to walk out and stick up your arm for a cab as to use any sort of ride-hailing app, and while using Swarm to check in was handy to create a record of where I’d been, it was a little superfluous with the pictures being tagged.
The moral of this story is simple: if you’re not really going anywhere and not socializing, then what is the point in having a device on you that’s just going to steamroll you with all the stuff you’re trying to get away from? There is no percentage in it. Instead, as 2G shuts off my F3 and the lack of updates slowly obsoletes my Moto X, I will soon have this 3310 for a while to be a species of cosplay, an artifact dropped in from another edit of life where it’s all you really need to get by. It’s a new tool in the escape kit. It’s the same phone you give a toddler…for the same reason. It even looks right.
We’ll see if it helps.