long regarded as 'the indestructible cell phone'

(at least, as far as a lot of the Internet is concerned).

It's one of those devices that's earned a die-hard cult following

through memes, social media, and imageboards

to the point where it's become this sort of

legendary piece of tech, representative of everything tough

and long-lasting.

It's a trait that is especially notable in the modern world

of disposable smartphones which are high in power

but often low in durability and lasting appeal.

With a smartphone, so often if the owner doesn't get bored with it first,

it's the phone itself giving up the ghost, sometimes in spectacular fashion.

But was the Nokia 3310 really all it was cracked up to be?

What led to it becoming such a symbol of robust mobile tech,

to the point where Nokia and HMB Global reintroduced

the 3310 as a brand new feature phone in 2017?

I was curious about this because, personally, I never owned one,

and I didn't know anybody that did back in the day either.

When the 3310 was introduced in the year 2000, the few folks I knew with a cell phone

had something like the Nokia 5100 series.

These were the phones that introduced me to things like

colored faceplates, SMS text messaging, and of course the game Snake.

And my goodness, they could take a beating!

I remember a friend of mine accidentally dropped theirs out the window

of a moving car while driving 55 on the highway, only to go back

and find it on the side of the road completely intact.

In my mind, that phone is the one I think of when I think of classic and durable Nokia mobile devices.

Fast-forward a decade or so though, and I started seeing endless images

regarding the 3310 - a model of phone I'd never seen in person.

So, I looked up the sales numbers, and there's no doubt it was popular,

selling over 126 million units worldwide.

But it's not even in the top ten best sellers, coming in at number twelve or so.

As I looked at this list, I got to wondering - why isn't the Nokia 1100

the subject of all those memes?

I remember seeing them all over the place, sold through companies like TracPhone,

and it's the number one mobile handset of all time in terms of worldwide sales numbers alone.

And so, I bought one of each, and when comparing them side-by-side,

the 1100 seems to be just as well built a phone as the 3310.

Even though they were released a few years apart, their feature sets are

mighty similar, including many of the same exact applications, games, and technical abilities.

The 1100 even has a bit of a leg up in terms of things like resolution

and worldwide network availability,

which led to them being a mainstay of contractless and low-cost service providers until at least 2009

while the 3310 series only stuck around until 2005.

Furthermore, one of the very first 'indestructible Nokia' memes from 2011

actually shows the 1100 instead of the 3310!

And finally, it turns out that there's one big reason I may have missed out on the 3310

back in the day - it wasn't actually sold in the United States, and it didn't even work on our networks at all.

It wasn't until the later 3390 model that I've been showing here

that Americans got their own flavor of the 3310,

and by then many people were using other Nokia mobiles instead.

That's not to say that this phone was rare in the US or anything like that - far from it - but

I found it an important piece of the puzzle that the 3310 was a bit of a bigger deal internationally.

Regardless of my own inexcusable American ignorance though, the 3310 has

nonetheless achieved serious worldwide recognition in recent years,

and it makes sense. Whether or not you were familiar with the exact phone model,

most everyone of a certain age had some experience with a Nokia phone

that looked pretty similar. They all shared the same design language,

they almost always had games like Snake on them, and tons of us have at least one

memory or story of a Nokia phone stubbornly holding together in the face of destruction.

Whether it's being flushed down a toilet, falling off the roof of a building,

or stopping a freakin' bullet, there's no shortage of stories of Nokia phones surviving absurd odds.

And their bulletproof build quality became a point of pride for Nokia's home country of Finland,

and the 3310 in particular even got its own exclusive Emoji there in 2015,

called appropriately enough, 'The Unbreakable".

And even though I never used one back when it was new, I can absolutely see the appeal.

The 3300 series feels like holding a bar of soap with the density of a brick,

yet it remains pleasant to use, with better buttons than the 1100

and some other similar phones of its day I've used.

This thing is a time capsule of the early 2000's, bringing to mind a more innocent era

when even basic consumer electronics were still thrilling.

Even if these things were relatively cheap and plentiful, you could do things

like play Snake and create your own ringtones with the built in editor - how cool is that?

♪ radical Nokia solo ♪

This was also the time when phones were starting to get online using Wireless Access Protocol browsers.

Ah man, WAP optimized websites - now that brings back memories of countless shady ringtone downloads.

And that's really what all this comes down to - collective memories, and a hefty dosage of nostalgia.

Even if the 3310 is not the exact Nokia phone you had back in the day,

it kind of doesn't matter.

Maybe it's not the best selling, the most fully featured, or even the most robust of early 2000's handsets,

but it represents all of those things in one concise package.

The 3310 is a lot like the floppy disk in pop culture these days - more of a symbol than it is an absolute truth.

Floppy disks are the international icon of saving despite their relative unreliability,

and the 3310 is the international symbol of indestructible tech, despite there being better selling

Nokia phones that could fit the bill.

And, if nothing else, it's a fascinating thing to see a modern remake of a classic device

which arguably wouldn't have happened without anonymous Internet users spreading a bunch of

memes perpetuating a single idea.

Whether or not the 2017 model of the 3310 turns into anything memorable is yet to be seen,

and personally I have my doubts, but regardless - the original 3310 phone

is one for the history books, and will no doubt remain the symbol of indestructibility

in our collective consciousness for years to come.

And if you enjoyed this video on this topic, perhaps you'd like to see some other related ones that I've done

and I'm always doing new videos every Monday and Friday here on LGR, so stay tuned if you like.

Thank you very much for watching.