Nokia 3210 phone relaunched for 25th anniversary – and yes, there's Snake:
One of the most popular early mobile phones – the Nokia 3210 – has been relaunched to mark the device's 25th anniversary.
Human Mobile Devices (HMD), the maker of Nokia phones, said it had relaunched the "cultural icon" as demand for simpler devices as part of a digital detox was rising.
The revamped 3210 includes a two-megapixel camera, supports 4G calling and will still include classic mobile game Snake, HMD confirmed, with the device priced at £74.99 (US$94).
"The Nokia 3210, a cultural icon, is back at the pinnacle of the global dumbphone boom as consumers look to balance their screen time usage with a digital detox," Lars Silberbauer, HMD's chief marketing officer, said.
[...] Mobile phone expert Ben Wood, founder of the virtual Mobile Phone Museum, said the original Nokia 3210 has a "special place in many consumers' hearts" as one of the bestselling mobile phones of all time.
See also:
- Nokia 3210 - Wikipedia
- Redesigned Nokia 3210 (2024) launched with YouTube Shorts support, iconic Snake game: price, specs
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2024, @12:24AM (2 children)
Old phones did a couple of things really well, especially flip phones.
They weren't designed to have sheeple permanently staring at them.
Indication of messages w/o turning on the display
A clock
KaiOS dumbed-down Android flip phones are crap.
(Score: 2, Funny) by shrewdsheep on Monday May 13 2024, @07:17AM
Actually, at that time, I perceived this as the first signs of sheeplehood. Why would a message ever be so urgent you have to see it immediately? (If you are a sheep, be shrewd).
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday May 13 2024, @07:42AM
Yes, I'm disappointed with KaiOS as well.
I really liked the form-factor of the JioPhone F300B and F20A, but only available in India, SIM locked to the Relliance Jio network [kaios.dev].
JioPhone 2 F300B [gsmchoice.com]
amazon.in JioPhone F20A [amazon.in]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by drussell on Monday May 13 2024, @12:24AM
I would still be using my good ol' 6160 if Rogers hadn't shut down the TDMA network in the mid 2000s...
The original 3210 was somewhat similar functionality-wise, but a bit chunkier physically and a GSM radio with SIM card.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2024, @12:30AM (6 children)
So it has all of the nostalgia of the old phone, but upgraded with all of today's digital tracking and surveillance we've come to love?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday May 13 2024, @03:21AM (2 children)
It's like the new Fiat 500, the new Mini or the new VW bus: they have nothing to do with the original vehicles. They're just branded to appeal to nostalgia.
Similarly, in 2007, I bought a "new" HP-35 [wikipedia.org]: it was nothing like the original HP-35: it had a crap keyboard and I regretted it instantly. But HP got my money because I had fond memories of the real thing.
This cellphone is exactly the same thing: it's a scam to grab older people's money.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by KritonK on Monday May 13 2024, @06:24AM
After refusing for years and years to get a cell phone, I finally gave in, as I couldn't even donate @&%#$&^ blood without having a cell pone! I got myself a Nokia 3310 (2017 edition) [wikipedia.org]. It does its job extremely well: it makes and receives phone calls and its battery lasts for days. I've never had it run out of battery, and I still have it, with no noticeable decrease in battery life. If the phone ever stops working, I'll probably replace it with something like the 3210 or whatever retro model will be available from Nokia at that time.
So, no, this is not a scam to grab older people's money. It's a phone for people who want a reliable phone, not a battery-draining multimedia device that can maybe make phone calls, if the battery is not empty.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Monday May 13 2024, @10:10AM
Or a device you can hand to your teenager if they simply must have a cell phone but you're not trying to raise them to be a useless lump of flesh.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2024, @06:14AM
Sure the cells nowadays are smaller which can provide better precision, but there were small cells back then too.
Is the bluetooth always on or does it default to on? If no, then that's more like opt-in tracking.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday May 13 2024, @11:43AM
Don't forget battery life used to be around 3 to 5 days and consumers have been trained to accept 12 hours now.
(Score: 2) by corey on Tuesday May 14 2024, @11:10PM
What tracking? Got any references? Or, Maybe my sarcasm detector isn’t awake yet.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Monday May 13 2024, @02:24AM
I loved my N 3210 from the early 2000s. If the new one is near as tough and can handle 4G-LTE, I'm in (Especially at 100 bucks).
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ShovelOperator1 on Monday May 13 2024, @07:18AM (1 child)
The battery time is really poorly described here.
Generally: Do manufacturers of any modern phone expect we will all put a capsule of Strontium and a thermocouple in our bottoms to power these things?
Really, this is insane. We have a technology to run Linux kernel with some processes on a chip card consuming a few milliamps of current, we have a really good battery technology allowing us to put over 2Ah in the pack which was 500mAh back in Nokia's time, but we cannot make this telephone work for longer than...
My more than a decade old Samsung dumb-phone has a 2Ah battery and quite well-written interrupt-driven OS. The experienced total talk time is about 20 hours, untouched it works about 3-4 weeks on a single charge and when continuously playing music it can go for as long as 15-17h. I think in this particular feature the main problem is the complete refreshing of a display during the entire playback (so even if the light is turned off, the contents do not vanish), because MP3 player steals interrupt of some power-related timer.
There is also the Java 2 ME, yet I use it so rarely that I cannot tell how it affects the battery.
It is possible to build a phone which works longer on a single charge. The microcontroller can be a really small part, activated only when something happens. The circuits can be switched on or off, and, finally, if the phone does not play HD movies nor streams or use web browser, it may just not use modems which work on energy-wasting bands!
Sorry, a mistake: Bands which waste energy by shifting more of the "electronics work" to the poorly-designed end user modems, while the stations have (unused for 99% of time) energy saving modes so suddenly they are "green" in their certificates.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 13 2024, @12:06PM
A lithium-ion 2Ah is probably smaller than you think unless you've worked with them. I'd like to see a classic 1980s brick phone that has, say, 20 aH or so and only requires bi-monthly charging to top it off. That would be about "book size". Well, it's kind of a thick book, but 80s phones were big. Imagine a stack of about six AA batteries and you're pretty close to what 20 aH of Li-ion would look like.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Monday May 13 2024, @07:26AM
One of my backup phones is a Nokia 8110 4G, which also serves as a pocket Wi-Fi hotspot with one of the other major mobile telcos in my country, for when I travel domestically and wind up in places where the signal strength of my main phone is less reliable. It cost about as much as a pocket Wi-Fi but with a bit more flexibility as it has a keypad that I can use to configure it, and it can take calls and SMS text messages too. It's also a respin of the famous phone that featured in the first Matrix movie, which was as much a selling point for me as anything. The 3210 though was the first mobile phone I ever bought, back in 1999/2000 when these things first started becoming common out here. I miss having phones that have battery life measured in multiple days.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Monday May 13 2024, @08:13AM (3 children)
I think one of the things that kills battery life is the current web. Browsers have become behemoths that soak up cpu running vast amounts of javascript, and the 'need' to support web standards translates into needing powerful (and power hungry) processors and large quantities of RAM. Running GNSS doesn't help.
I wish there was some kind of public a standard that was a lowest common denominator, designed to use minimal resources, which is it obligatory to support if offering a regulated/public service, so accessing government services and banks didn't require expensive and power-hungry 'smart' phones.
I've been hit by my bank shutting down web-browser based access in favour of 'smartphone' app only, which is not my preference.
The trouble is, I'm in a minority. The vast majority of folk like the 'convenience' of 'smartphones'.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 13 2024, @12:00PM (1 child)
"obamaphone" technically named the "FCC lifeline service.
I am too lazy to look up what they're handing out in 2024 but AFAIK the program still exists.
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Monday May 13 2024, @12:36PM
I don't live in the U.S.A., but I think Lifeline [fcc.gov] is about 'affordable connectivity', not about regulating delivery of services.
Online banking pre-dates the general availability of the Internet [wikipedia.org]. The communications bandwidth and processing capacity available in the early 1980's far far, far less than available now, but the essential features of the user interface have not changed. It makes no sense to require extremely powerful systems to do the same job. Online banking does not, for example, require Javascript, or an entire smartphone app framework, and I would submit that is should not, to ensure the greatest possible accessibility.
(Score: 3, Informative) by stormwyrm on Wednesday May 15 2024, @06:52AM
Indeed, it seems that almost all major websites of note are running tons of poorly-written, bloated, and unoptimised JavaScript programs whose usefulness to the actual purpose of the website is dubious at best. You don't notice it so much when you're running on standard PC hardware which can soak up the bloat, but when you have a single-board computer with an ARM or RISC V CPU which has more marginal support and lesser specs things quickly slow to a crawl. This happens on smartphones too (which generally use more or less the same hardware as SBCs), hence the proliferation of standalone smartphone apps because phone browsers can't handle the JS bloat either. This is the problem with the "worse is better [dreamsongs.com]" mentality that pervades software engineering these days.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Monday May 13 2024, @10:11AM
As much as I at least in theory want to simplify I don't think I could go back this far anymore. Could or want here might be interchangeable. I still like a somewhat bigger screen, I want the onscreen keyboard for sending messages. I do not want to go back to having to hit some key three or four times to get the correct letter to show up. That sucked so hard. Beyond that I don't need any apps. The screen could be black and white or some high contrast thing. Don't need all the colours, as I don't use it to view movies or surf the web. So I'm stuck somewhere in the middle, I like it for the simplicity and battery but it still lacks features I would like but bloats on other parts. Damned if you do ...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday May 13 2024, @11:56AM
The marketing is not good; the first time I saw this I thought it was a Bluetooth headset in a classic phone-shaped container and you'd pair the toy to your modern phone. Surprisingly, this is a "real phone" not a Bluetooth headset, interesting.
If 3D printer owners didn't care about copyright/trademarks they could print all kinds of classic phones and stick the innards of a BT headset in them.
I would like to go really retro and get one of those nice 1980s Radio Shack first gen brick phones. Or go full on "bag phone". The past is already disappearing from the internet; I can only find a picture of a CT-200 from '88 which is a second generation bag phone. Yes I could go to the online collection of radio shack catalogs (unless that has also disappeared from the internet) and do some cut-n-paste, but ...
(Score: 2) by moylan on Tuesday May 14 2024, @03:58PM
i use it every day as my primary phone. now with 3g being turned off in ireland i am in the market for a new dumb phone.
but this nokia won't be it. the nokias from hmd since 2020 won't allow the end user to install their own java apps. they have a few games they'll sell you to that you can install but no others.
on the nokia 3310 from 2017 i had a web browser with rss reader. now not working with data turned off.
i had an ereader. albite java app
a notepad app gbjotpad.
a spreadsheet app microcalc
a dozen or so games
2 emulators, c64 and zx spectrum.
plus a 32gb card filled with ebooks, all of blackadder, porridge and yes minister tv shows
this phone is a step backwards sadly.