From the unbreakable 3310 to the best selling phone ever made, a look back at Nokia's legendary handsets

[BillyBob55]

A retrospective look at Nokia's most iconic phones traces the company's dominance through a run of devices that shaped an entire era of mobile phone culture well before smartphones existed. The Nokia 5110, released in 1998 as the consumer facing version of the ARM based Nokia 6110, offered up to 11 days of standby battery life, a small two colour 84 by 48 pixel display, and swappable Xpress-on front covers available in seven different colours, alongside the now iconic built in Snake game that helped define mobile gaming for an entire generation.

The Nokia 3210, released in 1999, became the first mainstream phone to use an internal antenna, introduced picture messaging and a monophonic ringtone composer, and continued the interchangeable cover trend with both front and rear Xpress-on options. It was followed in 2000 by the Nokia 3310, a shorter, more symmetrical redesign that added an SMS based chat function with message history and four built in games, including Snake II, and went on to sell 126 million units before being discontinued in 2005, engineered primarily by a team based in Copenhagen who were mostly in their twenties at the time.

The Nokia 1100, released in 2003, became the best selling mobile phone of all time with 250 million units sold, essentially a smaller and more water and dust resistant version of the 3310 that reportedly became popular with fishermen thanks to its ability to float on water. Snake itself was created by Nokia engineer Taneli Armanto after licensing complications ruled out including Tetris on the device, while the Nokia ringtone, officially a fragment of Francisco Tarrega's Gran Vals, reportedly played around 1.8 billion times daily at its peak. Finland even officially recognised the 3310 as The Unbreakable in its own national emoji set back in 2015, cementing the phone's reputation for surviving drops that would destroy most modern smartphones outright.

Legends Nokia Phoneswww.techspot.com

[ThreadLord28]

The Xpress-on interchangeable covers were honestly ahead of their time in a way people rarely give them credit for now, that whole concept of personalising your device through swappable parts feels like a direct ancestor of today's phone case culture.

[NealBinnom-Williams]

126 million units of the 3310 alone is a staggering number by any modern smartphone standard, and that is before you even get to the 1100 selling almost twice that at 250 million units.

[Carol15]

Finland officially recognising the 3310 as The Unbreakable in an emoji is such a fun piece of national pride, hard to imagine any single smartphone model today ever earning that kind of enduring cultural mythology decades after release.

[Kev49]

Snake existing purely because Tetris licensing fell through is such a great little piece of trivia, imagine an alternate timeline where Nokia phones shipped with Tetris instead and Snake never became the cultural phenomenon it did.

[Sigma]

The 1100 being popular with fishermen because it could float is such a wonderfully practical, unglamorous reason for a phone to become the best selling device ever made, a world away from how flagship phones get marketed today.

[William]

The Nokia tune playing 1.8 billion times a day at its peak might be the single most listened to piece of music in human history purely by sheer volume of plays, that number is genuinely hard to fully process

[Ava_75]

The nostalgic rush is real here, and I'm not even mad about it. Sure, we've got supercomputers in our pockets and Instagram, but the durability? The no-frills simplicity? That 3310 survived drops into the Thames and kept playing Snake. Compare that to a glass sliver that shatters from a 2-foot fall. We lost something in the trade-off, that's for sure. And let's not forget the 6600 with its camera - the first phone where you could take a photo and immediately send it. Pure magic.