Helen Coffey : “Can Nokia 3210 simplify life?” – 29 characters

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Nu phone, who dis?

It’s a phrase I expected to be typing out with nostalgic joy – for the first time in two decades – as I switched on the new and improved Nokia 3210. Twenty-five years after its original heyday, the iconic mobile phone of my youth has had a relaunch for 2024 – a savvy response to a rising backlash against the insidious side effects of heavy smartphone use. Alas, I waited in vain: to be able to send such a pithy response, I’d have first had to receive a text message. But no one – not even my 72-year-old mother – sends text messages anymore. They use WhatsApp.

It’s just one of a vast number of examples of how every facet of life has adapted to revolve around devices in the smartphone era. And it doesn’t take long to realise that there’s not one inch of my existence that isn’t, in some way, facilitated by a palm-sized screen: my work, my social life, my love life, my travel, my finances.

In times gone by, I always proudly identified as “an analogue girl” (largely because it sounded cuter than “luddite technophobe weirdo”). I preferred books to Kindles, had an honest-to-goodness Filofax as my diary, and continued to use a physical bank card to pay for stuff. I was such a late adopter that most people had gone on to a much cooler digital after-party by the time I arrived.

I still remember drawing maps on scraps of paper whenever I had to reach a new destination, because paying extra for data seemed an extravagant waste of cash; still remember a friend once swiping left on my smartphone to find an empty screen and asking in breathless horror: “Where are all your apps??”

Cut to 2024 and, while I’m still a far cry from an early adopter, my stubborn resistance to tech has been no match for our overwhelmingly online society. I’m as pathetically addicted as the next digital junkie.

According to 2023 research from DataReportal, the average screen time for users around the world aged 16 to 64 is six hours 37 minutes a day, three hours and 46 minutes of which is accounted for by smartphone use. UK adults spend the equivalent of 56 days a year online, says Ofcom research, while my millennial demographic boasts the highest number of apps of any age group, averaging 41. Again, the “analogue girl” of old would be appalled: I currently have a grand total of 43 (not including the built-in ones my phone came with).

Lately, I’ve been feeling increasingly uncomfortable about the ease with which I’ve slid into this “new normal” – a life orbiting around the device in my pocket. Recent research linking a mental health crisis in children and young people with the rise of the smartphone makes for alarming reading; admissions from those who developed social media platforms acknowledging that they created a monster provide even more incentive to cut back. One tactic encouraged by campaigners, including social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, is the introduction of better “basic” phones to avoid giving children smartphones. The popularity of these “dumbphones” – ones with functions such as calling, texting and setting alarms – is on the up, particularly for Gen Z, four in 10 of whom worry they spend too much time on their smartphones. They’re the only generation whose social media use has actually declined since 2021, reports The Guardian.

Suspicion around privacy, data-harvesting and manipulations to keep us endlessly scrolling have driven trends such as the #bringbackflipphones hashtag on TikTok. Meanwhile, HMD, the company behind Nokia’s relaunch, saw its flip phone sales double by April 2023. Retro tech is officially cool again.

And thus it is that I find myself jumping on the offlining bandwagon and excitedly unboxing a new 3210, the same model as my first ever mobile when I was a teenager, to see whether swapping my Samsung for this revamped brand of minimalism can help me re-engage with the real world. You pay a premium for this level of nostalgia: retailing at £74.99, it’s three times the price of the Nokia 105 dumbphone.

Things get off to a rocky start. I plug it in to charge it and nothing happens; I push the power button and zilch. After 10 minutes spent furiously trying out various sockets, unplugging and reinserting the charger, and jabbing at every single button on the phone, I finally realise the obvious – the battery isn’t in the handset yet. It’s been so long since I’ve had a phone where you physically could remove the battery that I just… forgot.

Before I switch sim cards, I download WhatsApp onto my laptop – at least that way I won’t be a total social pariah – and mentally run down what else might be essential from my smartphone.

Train tickets! They’re all on the Trainline app. OK, fine, there must be a code for printing them out at the station. But no – try as I might, I cannot locate anything that would allow me to access paper versions from the ticket machine. The only analogue alternative is to print off the QR codes at home; being a millennial I, of course, don’t have a printer. Hmm. I decide I’m going to have to cheat and use my smartphone to get into London for work – I don’t think my boss would quite accept the “my burner phone ate my homework” excuse.

In more positive news, I quickly find that my new 3210 has the classic Noughties game, Snake. In fact, this is the first question everyone asks me when they see my dumbphone: “Does it have Snake?” (Well, that and whether I’ve become a drug dealer.) It’s as inexplicably compelling as I remember, although this version’s been treated to a jazzy colour upgrade and the snake is eating apples rather than dots. The game provides a welcome stand-in for what my thumbs would usually be doing: scrolling social media until my brain turns to mush.

Other useful extras include a torch, voice recorder, calculator and eight further games. The phone also has 4G internet, which I really wasn’t expecting – the quaintly basic functionality brings to mind the early days of the web, flooding my head with wistful recollections of MSN Messenger and Myspace. You can practically hear the chirrups, whistles and Matrix-like white noise of the dial-up modem tone as you click the icon. Ah, memories!