Day 238: Today's Pick — The Nokia 3210 (2024 Reissue)

In 2024, HMD Global, the Finnish company that holds the licensing rights to the Nokia phone brand, did something I would not have predicted: they reissued the Nokia 3210, the 1999 candy-bar feature phone that, twenty-five years ago, taught half the planet how to text.

The reissue is, depending on whom you ask, a piece of clever marketing, a small gesture toward the digital-detox movement, or the most useful tech purchase you will make in 2026. I am — having now carried one for about six months — closest to the third position, with caveats.

Let me describe the object first.

The new Nokia 3210 is a polycarbonate candy-bar phone, about 12cm tall, weighing 84 grams, with a 2.4-inch color LCD, a numeric keypad with five-way directional pad, a 2-megapixel rear camera, a 1450 mAh battery, dual-SIM tray, microSD slot, and 4G LTE connectivity. It runs an operating system called KaiOS, which is a stripped-down Linux-based feature phone OS with a small app store containing roughly two dozen apps — WhatsApp, YouTube (limited), a music player, an FM radio, and a version of Snake. There is no app for Instagram, no app for TikTok, no email client beyond a basic IMAP setup, and no web browser worth the name.

The battery, on a single charge, lasts roughly a week of light use. I want to repeat that: a week.

The phone costs $90.

Here's what I have learned, six months in, about how to actually use a Nokia 3210 in 2026.

I do not use it as my primary phone. The reality is that, for most of us, a smartphone is doing real work — Maps, banking apps, two-factor authentication, the work calendar, the ride-share apps, the camera that produces shareable images. Trying to fully replace that on a 3210 is, I would argue, both impractical and a slightly performative form of digital asceticism. The 3210 is not your primary phone.

What it is, instead, is a secondary phone. Specifically, a weekend phone.

What I have done is the following: my primary number is on my smartphone, in a permanent dock at home. My SIM in the 3210 is a cheap secondary line, with my real number forwarded to it. On weekends — Saturday morning to Sunday evening, when I am not on call for work — I leave the smartphone at home and carry the 3210. I can call. I can text. I can get a phone call from my parents if something is wrong. I cannot scroll Twitter. I cannot doom-watch the news. I cannot fall into a forty-minute hole reading reviews of espresso machines.

This system has changed my weekends. I will not over-claim. I am still, on Monday morning, a person who works in the same kinds of jobs as before. But the Saturday-and-Sunday quality of being a person with a 1999-style cell phone in your pocket is, genuinely, different from the Saturday-and-Sunday quality of being a person with a 2024-style cell phone in your pocket. The difference is roughly the difference between a vacation and a workday.

A few practical caveats.

WhatsApp on KaiOS works but is buggy. Group chats are slow. Voice messages sometimes refuse to play. If your social life happens primarily on WhatsApp, this will frustrate you.

iMessage doesn't exist. Your iPhone-using friends will text you in green bubbles. Some of them will not notice. Some of them will, and you will hear about it.

Maps don't really work. There is no Google Maps for KaiOS. There is a basic map app that is, charitably, aspirational. If you need turn-by-turn navigation, plan ahead with paper, or carry the smartphone for that one purpose.

The camera is genuinely bad. This is a feature, not a bug. Your photos will look like 2003 phone photos. Some of them will be the most charming photos you've ever taken. Most will be slightly out-of-focus and overexposed.

T9 texting is back. If you came of age before 2007, T9 will return to you in seconds. If you came of age after, give it twenty minutes. By the third hour you'll be texting at near-smartphone speed.

A note on the alternative. If the Nokia 3210 isn't quite for you, the Light Phone III (released 2025) is a more polished take on the same idea — a deliberately limited smartphone in a beautifully designed shell, with a longer learning curve and a $400 price tag. The 3210 is a $90 toe-in-the-water; the Light Phone is a $400 commitment. Start with the 3210.

Day 238. The pick is, gently, the phone you don't pick up.