Is there room for nostalgia in consumer tech?

Or, why would Nokia relaunch the 3310?

Last Monday, I said the world missed an opportunity by ditching Concorde. It was the starting block for supersonic travel to get better, though was abandoned for the status quo – slower, more-cost-effective aircraft.

Technology has always gotten better because we’ve demanded more of it. The wheel evolved from its first use in pottery and became essential for transport, and then developed from stone to wood to rubber and titanium. No one’s calling for stone wheels to be put back on our cars, but – at least in the consumer world – there does appear to be a fascination with old technology.

Vinyl has come back strong over the past decade, the NES returned last year and, later this month, HMD Global will unveil the new old Nokia 3310. My question – and I assume a lot of other people’s – is why? Why now, why the 3310, and why do they think we’d want that?

The 3310 was the peak of fashion back in the year 2000, and has sold 126 million units since (for the sake of comparison, the iPhone 7 sold between 70 and 75 million in 2016, according to Forbes). The 3310 was sleeker than its competitors, had a tonne of pixels on its screen (well, 84 x 48) and could play the game Snake. I was in secondary school, and it was the phone to have.

A blast from the past

But I’ve grown up since then. I now enjoy having 4G at my fingertips, not GSM 900; I might want to take a photo instead of drawing one myself in black pixels; I want to check out LinkedIn on the app, not watch a MAD2WD1 processor turn to dust at the mere thought of doing so.

I don’t want to type using just 12 keypad buttons, I don’t want to use WAP and, to be honest, I don’t want to play Snake. It was crap.

So when I ask myself why the 3310 is being remade, I come to only two conclusions:

• So parents can buy their kids an inexpensive, near-unbreakable phone
• As a way to get Nokia’s name back in the headlines – the company will launch its 3, 5 and 6 models at the same event as the 3310.

And yet I’m happy it is being remade, for technology’s sake, because it has a little something left to give.

When Phone Arena asked people what they want in a smartphone, the most common answer was a big battery. With a 55-hour standby time, the 3310 certainly scratches that one itch, even if it fails in virtually every other category listed on this poll.

But if the Nokia 3310 proves that people seriously want more battery life from their devices, and will buy an archaic device for that very reason, it will be part of the evolution of smartphones – and that’s important.

It’s a strange thing to say about a 17-year-old device, but this little box of nostalgia might teach us something about emerging technology in general.

Some amazing advances are happening in the smartphone sector – from AR to AI, 4K video and wireless charging. But manufacturers have to get the basics right first, or find that there's little market for bells and whistles.