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

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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.

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