Nokia thought it was a good idea to bring back the phone that made them a superpower back in 2000.
Now when I was in high school (I guess I’ll date myself here) there were two phones that made you cool. The Sidekick (too bad it was on T-Mobiles awful network at the time) or the Nokia 3310. Sure we all remember playing Snake. I would ask my friend Liz in English class almost every day if I could play snake on her phone.
Shere we are 17 years after the all but complete demise of the company known as Nokia and they’ve re-released the device in some new colors.
It hurts my head to think about all of the thought the company put into this move before actually executing it but here are they are. Cool right? My first thought it oh they must run a real basic version of Android. Truth is I don’t even think they’re that smart.
They by no means try to impress us with features. This phone makes basic phone calls and text messages on a 2G network, takes under-staturaed photos with it’s less than stunning 2MP rear camera, and plays snake. Oh and don’t worry music lovers, you won’t need Spotify with it’s built in 16Mb of onboard storage, you’ll be able to take your top 3 songs wherever you go.
There was one other major feature that back in 2000 this phone was praised for and that is battery life. Nokia says the new 3310 will last 31 days on standby. That doesn’t surprise me because the phone really doesn’t do anything. If I put my iPhone in Airplane Mode and put it to sleep it would last a month as well.
They did get one thing right and that’s the pricing. The phone only costs about 49euro or $51.87 but really, what is the point? Sadly there will be people out there who purchase this phone and immediately get confused when they can’t find the app store because they’ve never had a phone without one. To those people I say good luck. Perhaps you’ll frustrated enough to purchase one of the original 3310’s on eBay currently going for about $90 (Go figure) and see what life was really like before the App Store.
For more exciting news make sure to check out their video release of the device, which in one day has 2.5 million hits, which is about $5000 in revenue from YouTube, which could buy about 1000 shares of their company stock, which I hope was about less than their entire R&D budget for this project.
Until next time.