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Home / Hot Stuff / This reborn Nokia 3210 is a dumbphone time machine

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

Nokia 3210

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.

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About

Connor is a writer for Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website. He has been writing for around seven years now, with writing across the web and in print too. Connor has experience on most major platforms, though does hold a place in his heart for macOS, iOS/iPadOS, electric vehicles, and smartphone tech. Just like everyone else around here, he’s a fan of gadgets of all sorts! Aside from writing, Connor is involved in the startup scene. This exciting involvement puts him at the front of new and exciting tech, always on the lookout for innovating products.

Areas of expertise

Mobile, macOS, EVs, smart home