I still have my Nokia 3210 somewhere. Not in a drawer I can easily reach but boxed up in the garage with the party decorations and a broken food processor I’ve been meaning to fix since 2019. I know it’s there because I packed it deliberately when we moved house, which means at some point I looked at a phone with a cracked screen, a battery that hasn’t held charge since the Blair administration, and the faint ghost of a Snake high score, and thought: *I might need this.*
I don’t know what I thought I’d need it for. A nuclear EMP? A particularly aggressive detox? The vague sense that one day all the smartphones would stop working and I’d be vindicated for keeping a brick that could survive a house fire and still make a call, assuming I could find a network that remembered what 2G was?
My kids found it a few weeks ago while hunting for some party banners. It didn’t miraculously power on, and I don’t know where the charger is. I tried to explain to them the 4 functions it had and they didn’t quite understand how Snake could even be considered entertainment.
But it got me thinking, those old Nokia’s were pretty much indestructible. There have even been reports where the Nokia’s have stopped bullets and saved the persons life. Now compare that to the Samsung Galaxy fold I had a couple of years ago. I think I breathed on it the wrong way and the screen developed a fault. And then because there was a tiny scratch on the corner of the phone, I was told the warranty wouldn’t cover it because there was ‘physical damage’.
Have we traded indestructibility for convenience, and we’re absolutely certain we got the better deal. Are we just holding onto the wrong things, or have we forgotten what durability even looked like?