Nokia 3310: why it became a legend

It's hard to find a cell phone more cited in popular culture than the Nokia 3310. Released in 2000, it weighed 133 grams, had a lithium battery and a bare-bones display — five lines of twelve characters, preloaded games (including the inevitable Snake). Nothing that, on paper, radically sets it apart from its contemporaries.

And yet in our archive it's among the models with the most votes overall: 1,007 real ratings, with an average of 3.2/5, and 227 comments left over time by those who owned it — numbers that very few other models in the archive reach: only 165 profiles out of over 5,000 have received more votes than the 3310.

Its reputation for indestructibility became a meme spread across the internet well before "meme" was a common word, to the point of spawning durability tests — real and imagined — that went viral in the years following its release. It's not an isolated case of nostalgia: it's one of the few phones in our archive whose reputation has far outlasted its technological generation.

Want to discover another technology that became a standard in record time? We talk about it in WAP: The Archive's Fastest Rise.