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These days, your phone stays connected to the internet wherever you go, quietly feeding countless services (and vice versa). It's hard to even imagine a phone with no internet access. What could it even do? What would it look like?
At the turn of the millennium, most phones weren't online, because being online wasn't a very attractive feature. Cellular networks ran many times slower than they do today, and a single web page could take minutes to load.
Back then, phones were mostly used for voice calls, paid for by the minute. They could send SMS, but the format was designed to replace voice mail, not to carry a live conversation. The ideal phone was the one with the smallest dimensions and the longest battery life, which made a large display, or even a full keyboard, seem out of place.
While most phones hid their keypads behind fragile flip lids, Nokia took over the market with phones designed like remote controls: easy to operate with one hand, and resistant to drops. With customizable exteriors and one addictive game, it made phones fun for the first time.
The iconic tech gadgets that shaped our world. From groundbreaking gaming consoles to revolutionary mobile devices and music players, discover the legends of technology.
In the 1990s, the US was dominated by analog networks that didn't even support SMS, running phones with calculator-like displays. As cellular plans carried expensive minimum fees, cell phones were seen as the domain of businesspeople, and only the most spoiled teenagers.
Meanwhile, Europe had already moved on to 2G digital networks. Nokia had popularized the candybar form factor, allowing you to dial using the same hand holding the phone, unlike earlier phones shaped like bricks, which required dialing with the other. Once the US had shifted to digital, the Finnish company was ready to charge.
The Nokia 5110 was released in 1998 as the consumer version of the ARM-based Nokia 6110, dropping the features aimed at business users such as the infrared port. Internally it carried the codename Santra. Its 84 x 48 display, two colors and nothing more, was designed to sip as little battery as possible. The phone was advertised for offering 11 days in standby mode between charges, and for the replaceable front covers, branded "Xpress-on."
"The phone was advertised for offering 11 days in standby mode between charges..."
Those covers turned out to matter more than anything else on the spec sheet. Nokia made the front shell of the 5110 pop off with a thumb, sold it in seven colors with names like Antiqua Red and Tango Orange, and built a marketing campaign around the phrase "Freedom of expression."
It worked well enough that the company sponsored London Fashion Week the following year. A decade before phone cases became a multibillion dollar industry, Nokia had already sold the idea that your handset said something about you.
With a 12-button keypad, the Nokia 5110 wasn't ideal for text entry, but it was adequate for tasks involving numbers, from a calculator to an alarm clock. The phone also included games, but what kind of a game would people want to play on such a device? Even the decade-old Game Boy offered almost six times the resolution.
The answer came from a Nokia software engineer named Taneli Armanto, and it came by accident. Armanto joined the company in 1995 and landed on the user interface team, where colleagues divided up the work: they would handle the phone book, the calendar and the calculator if he took the games. They assigned him the games because they were under the impression he had built games before. He hadn't.
His first idea was Tetris. He implemented it, tested it, and liked it. The problem was licensing: The Tetris Company wanted a share of every handset sold, and Nokia had no interest in tying payments to exact unit counts. So Armanto went looking for something free of copyright that would fit a screen the size of a postage stamp. The brief he was actually working to was for a two player game, and his reference was a Macintosh game where two snakes were controlled by two people sharing one keyboard. He wanted to test whether the same thing could run between two handsets over infrared.
Snake shipped first on the Nokia 6110 at the end of 1997. But the consumer phone that made it famous, the 5110, was the one that had the infrared port removed, so the head to head version stayed a 6110 privilege. Armanto later pointed out that the hardware wrote the design for him: no levels, no tutorial, no graphics to speak of. The snake makes the game harder by growing.
Games similar to Snake had existed since at least 1976, with Blockade in the arcades, but thanks to Nokia it became one of the most played games in the world. The titular snake was three pixels wide, and needed to eat "orbs" made of four pixels without hitting the walls or its own growing body.
In the summer of 1998, the phone was released in the US as the Nokia 5190, 5160 and 5120, with different network support. At the end of the year, Gartner estimated that Nokia had surpassed Motorola as the world's top phone maker, with more than 37 million units sold.
The market as a whole grew 51% that year according to Gartner, with almost 163 million phones sold. Nokia later revealed it had actually sold 40 million phones in 1998, a 92% yearly growth, and estimated that 168 million phones were sold that year.
No Antenna, No Problem
Nokia released two influential phones in 1999. The Nokia 7110, inspired by the modified Nokia 8110 featured in The Matrix, was the first phone with a WAP browser, allowing it to access lightweight websites designed for cellular networks. It also introduced predictive text input.
The Nokia 3210 was the first mainstream phone with no external antenna – a feature that remained controversial for years. Alastair Curtis was tasked by Nokia's head of design, Frank Nuovo, with creating a phone for the kinds of people who didn't previously have a phone.
It was a phone people could throw in their bags without fear of the antenna breaking, or scratching other items. The internal antenna made the phone's upper half thicker, giving it the silhouette of a hair brush.
The Nokia 3210 was also the first phone to support Xpress-on covers on the rear as well as the front. With a curvy design, many color options and mainstream appeal, it could be seen as the phone equivalent of the iMac G3, released the previous year.
SMS-based "picture messaging" was another feature that first appeared on the Nokia 3210. It wasn't the kind of pictures that required a camera, or even the latest version of Paint, but it was an early example of non-verbal communication through phones. The phone could also be used to compose monophonic ringtones (imagine playing the piano with one finger).
The composer is worth pausing on, because it produced something that looks bizarre in hindsight: a peer to peer content ecosystem with no files, no store and no bandwidth. Tones were entered note by note on the keypad, and people shared them by passing around the keypress sequences as plain text, over SMS, in magazines, and on GeoCities pages that still turn up in search results today.
A song was a string that looked like "4f1, 4-, 4#g1." The underlying notation, RTTTL, was so simple that hobbyists still use it to play tunes on Arduino boards.
Nokia repeated its 92% yearly growth in 1999, with over 78 million phones sold.
Don't Be Bored. Be Totally Board.
The Nokia 3310, released the following year, was essentially a shorter and almost symmetrical Nokia 3210. It did feature an SMS-based chat function with nicknames and message history. It could also combine three 160-character SMS messages into a single message.
That chat function, not the toughness everyone remembers, was the actual pitch. Nokia's press release of September 2000 led with a "unique chat function," explicitly compared it to the desktop chat services people were using at the time – ICQ, anyone? The launch matched the pitch. The 3310 was unveiled at a lifestyle event in Oberhausen, Germany under the slogan "Don't be bored. Be totally board," while Nokia simultaneously launched it across Asia at "Nokia Unplugged" concerts in Hong Kong, Manila and Chengdu.
The joke of the 3310's launch is that chat was the one feature nobody wanted. The games, the ringtones, the covers and the screensavers were hits. The "chat rooms in your pocket" idea landed roughly eight years too early.
Two more things about the 3310 tend to surprise people. The first is that it wasn't especially Finnish. Most of the handset was engineered at the company's R&D center in Copenhagen, by a team of engineers mostly in their 20s. The internal codename was Beetle.
The second is who ran it. Product manager Lone Tram Middleton was in her early 20s and fresh out of business school. The 3310 was her first job out of university. She led the product team for two years, signed off on Snake II and the ringtone composer, and picked the colorways for the casing. The defining consumer object of its era was built almost entirely by people under 30.
It also shipped with four games, not one: Snake II, Pairs II, Space Impact, and Bantumi, a version of the African board game mancala that a surprising number of owners remember better than Snake.
Designed to come apart rather than break upon contact, the Nokia 3310 gained a reputation for being "indestructible." Related memes and YouTube videos of people trying to destroy the phone in various ways remain popular to this day.
The meme has a traceable birthday. In late 2011, a thread on Reddit's r/geek titled "The Terminator of cellphones" opened with someone posting a Nokia 1100; a reply posted a 3310 and crowned it "the Witch King." From there it escalated into a decade of destruction testing, including hydraulic presses, a 20mm cannon round captured in slow motion, and a Blendtec blender.
Finland, for its part, took the legend seriously. In November 2015, a full decade after the phone was discontinued, the country included the 3310 in its set of official national emoji, under the title "The Unbreakable." It shares the set with a sauna and a headbanger.
Similarly to the Nokia 5110, the phone was released in the US as the Nokia 3390, 3360 and 3320. An improved version with a WAP browser was later released as the Nokia 3330.
Nokia's growth didn't slow down in 2000, with 128 million phones sold. In 2001, global phone sales declined for the first time in history. Nokia still looked better than other companies, selling 140 million phones, but if it wanted to keep growing, it needed to innovate.
The Interim Internet
The Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) was activated in 2002, kickstarting the era of camera phones. The Symbian-based Nokia 7650 smartphone was released that year, with a 176 x 208 display and support for native third-party apps that could utilize the phone's camera, Bluetooth and internal storage. The phone was succeeded by the avocado-shaped Nokia 3600 series the following year.
For the mainstream market, Nokia released the Series 40 software platform, bringing color displays, polyphonic ringtones and limited Java-based apps to the masses.
The Nokia 1100, released in 2003, was essentially a smaller Nokia 3310 with improved water and dust resistance, made for regions such as Africa and southern Asia. It was reportedly beloved by fishermen, because it would float when dropped into water. It remains the best-selling phone of all time with 250 million units.
The phone market was growing again by 2003, as cellular plans became cheaper. In the 1990s, movies and TV shows depicted teenagers using cell phones as a joke. In less than a decade, such scenes had turned into cautionary tales. As the market grew, so did the competition, with Samsung, LG, and Sony (in a joint venture with Swedish company Ericsson) all trying to create the next hit.
This era saw the comeback of clamshell designs, notably with the Motorola "triplets": V600, V500 and V300. Such phones could incorporate a larger display without making the phone longer or the keypad smaller. Their main drawback was their increased thickness, a problem that was famously solved by the Razr V3. Sticking with the design Europeans were used to, Nokia's US market share had fallen to 10% by 2007 from 33% in 2002.
The Nokia 3310 was discontinued in 2005, having sold 126 million units – more than any other phone up to that point. In a world where even preteens carry cell phones, this number sounds unremarkable, but at the time, it was an absolute sensation.
Indestructible Memories
The adoption of 3G networks signaled the beginning of the end of limited WAP sites and phones with low-resolution displays. Both Symbian and Series 40 phones started shipping with 320 x 240 screens. Nokia sales peaked in 2008 with 468 million phones, but the average sale price started to drop as the iPhone 3G and BlackBerry Bold were taking over the premium segment.
As multitouch became the standard input method for smartphones, it was clear that Nokia needed a third-party operating system – and a leadership change. Symbian wasn't built with touchscreens in mind and was a nightmare to develop for. MeeGo, developed jointly with Intel to fit various device types, was taking too long to be ready.
In 2010, Nokia appointed its first non-Finn CEO: Stephen Elop, head of the Microsoft Business Division. Under Elop, Nokia chose the unproven Windows Phone over the popular Android. The early announcement, accompanied by the leaked "burning platform" memo, destroyed the sales of Nokia's Symbian phones. The resulting Lumia phones sold well eventually, despite the lacking app selection for Windows.
In 2013, smartphones overtook "feature phones" in global sales for the first time. That same year, Microsoft agreed to purchase Nokia's phone and devices division for $7.2 billion, retaining Elop as its new head of Devices Group. A possible explanation arrived just before the purchase was finalized the following year: the Nokia X series, running Android. If Nokia shifted to Android, the story of Windows Phone would be over. In 2015, new CEO Satya Nadella essentially shut down the division.
The following year, former Nokia executives formed HMD (Human Mobile Devices), securing the rights to sell phones under Nokia's name. Among these phones were the Nokia 3310 and Nokia 3210 feature phones, although they looked more like Series 40 phones from the late 2000s than their namesakes.
Tens of millions of people still remember the Nokia 3310 or 5110 as their very first phone. Nokia's default ringtone, taken from Francisco Tárrega's composition Gran Vals, remains one of the most recognizable melodies around the world.
That ringtone has its own small legend. Nokia executives picked out the four bar excerpt in 1993, and part of the appeal was practical: Tárrega had been dead long enough that the music was in the public domain, which meant no royalties attached to a sound that would ship on every handset. It debuted on the Nokia 2110 in 1994 with no special status at all, listed simply as "Type 7" among the other ringtones, and was only renamed "Nokia tune" in 1999. At its peak, it was estimated to play around 1.8 billion times a day.
Gran Vals, twice. One version rang in a billion pockets.
The other survivor from this tale was even stranger, and it only just died. That 84 x 48 screen from the 5110 spent the next two decades as a staple of hobbyist electronics, sold under the name "Nokia 5110 LCD" to anyone wiring up an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi. It cost less than a cup of coffee, sipped power, and stayed readable in direct sunlight, which is more than most modern screens can claim. Nobody was manufacturing them, though. The stock was salvage, harvested from dead handsets, and the retailers who sold it said so plainly. The well has finally run dry though.
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These "offline" phones allowed people to remain available everywhere without distracting them like modern phones do, pointing us to a completely different era of mobile computing. There was no feed to check, no notification badge, and no reason to look at the screen unless it rang.
What the Nokia 3310 and the 5110 quietly did, however, was to teach every habit the smartphone would later monetize: personalizing the device, messaging instead of calling, filling 5 idle minutes with a game. They just did it without apps, without broadband, and without a camera. The phones survived the drops. The habits survived everything else.
