The Nokia 3310, and the phone that survived everything.

Someone in the studio found an old Nokia 3310 in a desk drawer this week. A real one, from 2001. We put a SIM in it. It made calls. The battery hadn't been charged in eight years; after an hour on a cable, it was fine. There's a lot of useful nostalgia in there.

What it got right

• 01Battery life measured in weeks, not hours.
• 02A keypad you could use without looking — muscle memory took over within a day.
• 03An interface that did three things (calls, texts, Snake) and did them well.
• 04Physical buttons with real travel and a satisfying click.
• 05A polycarbonate shell that could survive being dropped on every surface in a London pub.

What we forgot

• 01Phones don't need to be glass slabs. The 3310 wasn't precious. You didn't put a case on it.
• 02An interface can be deep without being intimidating. The 3310's menu structure was a tree you could walk in your head.
• 03A device that does one thing brilliantly beats a device that does many things adequately. The 3310 was a phone. That was the entire pitch.
• 04Some constraints are gifts. The screen forced concision. Texts were short because they had to be.

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There's a version of hardware design that thinks first about how the device survives — and we've mostly forgotten how to do it.

What we'd take into 2024

• 01Battery as a design constraint, not an afterthought. Modern hardware can do better than 'lasts a day'.
• 02Physical affordances where they matter. The Apple Watch's digital crown is the closest thing we have to that 3310 dial.
• 03Software interfaces that you can navigate with your eyes closed.
• 04Devices that age gracefully, not catastrophically.

The 3310 sold over 126 million units. It is still bought, on purpose, in places where smartphone ownership is impractical. There's a version of hardware design that thinks first about how the device survives — and we've mostly forgotten how to do it.