This reborn Nokia 3210 is a dumbphone time machine
After 25 years, the Nokia 3210 is back! This time, it's pegged as a "dumbphone" to help you spend time away from your smartphone
50MP cameras. All-day battery. A huge light-blasting screen. We get it! The latest smartphones all like to brag about what they can do. But what if you want to get away from all of that? While not quite as good as a time machine, this dumbphone from Nokia is the next best thing. It’s a re-released Nokia 3210 brick phone – some 25 years after the handset was retired. Its goal is to get you to stop staring at your smartphone screen so much.
After 25 years of patiently biding its time, the Nokia 3210 is strutting back onto the scene. Why, you ask? Well, amidst a burgeoning ‘dumbphone’ boom, it seems there’s a growing crowd yearning to disconnect and perhaps relive the simpler days of the late ’90s and early 2000s. You know, the time when phones were just… phones.
This relaunched Nokia 3210 is more than a trip down memory lane, it’s also slightly refreshed for our 21st century fingers. Updated with a 2MP camera with flash (and a torch!), it can take some snaps. It’s been bolstered with a robust 1450 mAh battery for long, uninterrupted calls, and so you don’t need to plug in all the time. Fancy a game of Snake? It’s included, alongside the basic trimmings of a phone that refuses to let you do much more than text, call, and play. And (while we’ve not tested it yet), if you miss Instagram so much it drives you to chuck your phone at a wall, the Nokia 3210 should survive. The joys of a brick!
Feel like you can ditch your smartphone? The Nokia 3210, complete with its 1999 charm and a sprinkle of 2024 tech, will set you back £75/€79. This blast from the past is up for grabs in Scuba Blue, Grunge Black, and Y2K Gold. You can order it directly from HMD. Just not from the Nokia 3210 – you’d need the internet for that.
Connor Jewiss
