It was like a trip to Q’s lab for this particular journalistic James Bond. Back in 2000, it was day one at Channel 4 News and I was sent to the dark and windowless garage across the road to sign a chit and be issued with the latest hi-tech kit: silver, slim but reassuringly solid, with a weight to enable it be used, if necessary, to bludgeon a Spectre assassin; Bluetooth option. What the hell was Bluetooth anyway, Q? And a charger. Ah, that battery life. More on that later. Like Bond I never bothered reading a manual. The Nokia 3310 could be worked out on the go by instinct alone. The so-called “candy bar” shape fitted so reassuringly into a pocket. Unlike James Bond’s Beretta it’s never jammed on me or frozen mid-sentence like an iPhone.
It had the future, not obsolescence built into its functions. Even a move to the 6310i was really no change at all. Surely no one needed more than a handful of numbers and I knew them off by heart: the news desk, my beloved, and my mum, of course. The Nokia made me realise the power of phone memory by offering to remember them – 250 of them. Who could possibly need 250 numbers? I would scroll through the games, amazed at the options I would never have the time to explore.
Then there was the super-smooth texting. Those keys, based on a traditional push-button phone. Who wanted a microscopic qwerty keyboard when on a Nokia I could text so fast and so easily one-handed that I considered it the Roger Moore option – leaving the other one free for racier activity, perhaps? I began to seriously consider entering one of the international texting championships that were starting. I felt like I’d be a texting Clint Eastwood in a quick-draw showdown. When I worked out its predictive texting I felt like I was living life at the intensity of a hummingbird flapping its wings. This phone can read my thoughts. We act as one. Like Jack Schaefer’s cowboy hero Shane, I had become “a good [wo]man with a good tool”.
Sure, emails were always an option on the Nokia, but who wants emails on the go? They’re essentially still a letter that must be pulled out of an envelope. The beauty of the Nokia was the purity of the text message. If it’s important, text me. A discipline that I hold on to to this day.
Then there was the charge. At long-running court days and police investigation scenes, reporters would exchange stories in wonder about the number of hours it would sit on two bars. If not in constant use the Nokia could last a week easily. I knew I could dig mine out after months and it would still be alive and kicking.
After eight years the silver started to wear off the handset. But I began to notice the identically worn phones at high-powered conferences when I asked CEOs of blue-chip companies or government ministers to switch off gadgets before we went on stage. Don’t believe the lie that the more senior they are, the less likely they are to carry a phone. The Nokia was the device of choice to make the calls that matter to the people they trusted or loved.
But change was in the air.
After refusing every handset upgrade at work for 10 years, I was foolishly seduced by the siren call of the BlackBerry. All the new senior editors were waving them around. Maybe I was missing out? In the garage the technician looked amazed as I offered up my phone in exchange. “No one wants that,” he said. “You can keep it.” I swapped in my own SIM card and made it my personal phone.
It’s now been a year or so since I bought a smartphone. Damn those kitten memes. But the Nokia lives on. In my bedside drawer. Along with emergency cash and a torch. Ready for when times get tough. Makers of dystopian apocalypse movies should note that whomever will survive of us will be wielding a pre-2000 Nokia phone – and it will still have two bars of power.