First impressions

Back to the future, as the new Nokia 3310 (3G) finally lands in America. I don’t know if it was as iconic in this country, as the 3310 was a 900/1800 GSM device; while there were similar models in America none of them became as iconic for that era as the Motorola MicroTAC or StarTAC flips. So what happens when you harness nostalgia to a burner phone?

The Nokia 3310 in the US isn’t the dual-sim version, as it turns out. Instead you get a MicroSD slot where the second SIM would go, which I guess is fine for MP3 storage and playback. You won’t be doing much else with media on this phone for sure; the 2MP camera takes worse pictures than you could take with a potato. Which would also make for a superior browsing experience, as the phone features good old Opera Mini, a proxy browser I was trying to make the best of before I ever left the DMV for California.

In fact, this phone is a memento mori of how things used to be. Had you offered this phone for $65 in, say, 2006, people would have lost their damn minds. A Nokia with a 2-inch color screen, a 2 MP digital camera, Bluetooth and speaker phone and no thicker than your little finger? In a way, you can look at it and see the vestigial DNA of the Nokia 6620 which was my first real California phone when I started at Apple. The slight bulge in the middle and the screen that takes up the entire top half of the phone, oriented what we now think of as portrait rather than landscape? There is all the nostalgia you want here, and it’s true to life. You are getting the legitimate “Re-Elect Bush 2004″ mobile phone experience.

And it’s proof of why the iPhone had to happen to launch the true mobile Internet. Trying to interact with a tiny web browser screen with 12 keys and a D-pad is a nightmare. It also explains why the WAP deck was the key to everything in early mobile phone data: tiny trickle of information meant you could easily be given something like sports scores or basic weather or stock updates (delayed 15 minutes most likely) but anything that required graphical interaction was right out. 

So for my purposes, this is the shutdown-night phone, the device I use when I don’t actually want to be connected. What am I likely to need at that point? Well, Wikipedia, if I’m being honest, because I can’t deal with not being able to look something up as soon as I’m curious about it. And the UI for Wikipedia through Mobile Opera…I’ll make something up and be satisfied with that until I get outside. Where I can see what the weather’s like because it’s easier than trying to navigate to even the most bare-bones website for forecasts. Two things the iPhone revolution got us were a display big enough to be graphically useful and apps sufficient to cut through the web nonsense and get you straight to the data you need, frequently unencumbered by advertising. Modern web ads destroy the proxy browser as a viable choice.

The biggest kicker with this phone, though, is that 3G spectrum. Not only does it work here and abroad, it will continue to even as countries shut down and refarm their 2G spectrum for other 4/5G use. Right now T-Mobile is the last man standing with 2G in this country and even it will go away sooner than later, but UMTS/HSPDA 3G is barely 10 years deployed successfully in the US and will probably persist for a while yet. It may be functionally about where the phones I took to London in 2005 and 2007 are, but it’s not like I’m ever leaving the country without my SE ever again (until the SE2 or X-Minus appear).

Nope, this phone is another reminder of How We Used To Live. Kind of like my mechanical watch, a sort of sidestep into a world where I don’t need or want to be plugged in constantly. Just as the MOTOFONE F3 in 2007 was a reminder of what life was like in 1997, this phone is a reminder of what life was like in that last spring before the iPhone arrived, how things were what seems like a lifetime or two ago.

Of which…

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