Nokia 3210 Review: Simple phone or Digital Detox machine?

The reimagined Nokia 3210 will suit phone users who want a simple device just fine, but I’m still not convinced it’s much good for those needing a digital detox.

Score: 3.5/5

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In this review

Nokia 3210 Specifications
Nokia 3210 Design
Nokia 3210 Camera
Nokia 3210 Performance
Nokia 3210 Battery
Nokia 3210 Conclusion

HMD Global, the company that for the past few years has held the licence to produce “Nokia” branded phones, has started to shift away from that Nokia branding in favour of its own brand on phones, as seen in devices like the HMD Pulse Pro.

Nokia as a brand still has some value, however, especially for folks who want a more simplified phone experience. HMD’s also tried really hard to sell its Nokia feature phones like the Nokia 3210 as a “digital detox” proposition for those wishing to escape endless doomscrolling… with mixed results.

Fun digression: The first mobile phone I owned in the late 1990s was a Nokia 3210 – the original model, that is, I’m not a time traveller! – and it was stolen out of my car while my daughter was being born, because people are the worst, but also because it was just that desirable at that point in time.

Is that still true for the Nokia 3210? Let’s find out.

Also Read:

Nokia 2660 Flip Review

HMD Pulse Pro Review

Design

There really are only so many ways you can build a “candy bar” form phone, and back in the day Nokia tried its hand at most of them. Looking at the HMD version of the Nokia 3210, it feels reminiscent of the classic 3210, but with a few design ideas that do reveal its more modern status.

The Nokia 3210 ships in three colour choices, either “Y2K Gold”, “Grunge Black” or “Scuba Blue”. The cynical journalist side of my brain suspect they’re targeting Gen X there for some reason I just can’t fully quantify… but I digresss. The Scuba Blue model HMD sent my way for review is certainly visually striking, encasing everything save for the white front bezel and primary screen.

In keeping with classic feature phone style, the Nokia 3210’s display screen is quite small, just 2.4 inches, though its 320x240 resolution would have seemed amazing back in 1999. Physical controls are in your classic T9 style layout, with a five way directional controller and selection/call buttons at the top.

At the back, there’s a single camera lens, while the top houses a classic 3.5mm headphone jack – Bluetooth is also supported for audio – and the base has a simple USB-C port for charging.

The Nokia 3210 supports a removable battery, and it does so by allowing the entire back of the phone to be removed, which also reveals the dual nano SIM card slots. The left side is SIM-only, while the right is either a secondary SIM card slot or microSD expansion, with support for up to 32GB of expansion storage as needed.

Camera

Classic feature phones had cameras that were appropriate to the technology of the time… which is to say that they weren’t very good.

Reimagined feature phones like the Nokia 3210 keep with that old-school thinking, not in the way of having contemporary cameras for 2024, but instead having awful ones.

Even in good outdoor lighting, results are woeful.

Overexposure is a common problem.

Or in this case, one, with a single deeply unsatisfying 2MP sensor at the back of the camera for you to take your not-so-happy snaps with.

This Pac-Man machine takes better photos -- and it doesn't have a camera.

If you want selfies, you’re going to have to set the timer and flip the camera around to do so.

I know I'm not that photogenic, but the Nokia 3210 makes it worse. A lot worse.

The camera app is slow to start, slow to focus and whatever post-processing the Nokia 3210 is actually doing to create its shots doesn’t help with issues such as over-exposure, dodgy colour tones and terrible pickup even in low light all too common.

Shooting in low light? Forget it.

I guess you could pick up the Nokia 3210 and take photos with it as some kind of postmodern art project on failing eyesight or something… but beyond that, the camera here is just plain awful.

I call this one "stacked books showing the futility of man".

Performance

The Nokia 3210 runs on a Unisoc T107 processor with 64MB of RAM and 128MB of onboard storage, though precious little of that is actually available for your own files, as the preinstalled apps take up all but about 10MB of storage space.

While it’s interesting to note that the T107 is built on a 22nm process if you’re the technical type like myself, or that it’s also to blame for the 2MP camera, because that’s the maximum resolution the processor can take, it all but certainly doesn’t matter at all in the real world.

Here I want to diverge from my usual review style a little, because realistically there’s two different target markets for this phone.

Firstly, those who just want a “phone” for a phone’s sake, maybe with a few texts, and secondly for those wanting that “digital detox” device to get them away from their smartphones. So I’m going to split the review into sections here for those kinds of users, giving my advice for each use case.

If you just want the Nokia 3210 as a phone

The Nokia 3210’s phone setup should be instantly familiar if you’re an old-school feature phone user, which is a big plus. Phone features for calling, quick contact access and texting and front and centre, and I could totally see people who just want a feature phone never going further down the menu selection than, say, Snake, which is of course present.

One nice aspect here is the rather bright screen on the Nokia 3210, which makes it easy to see what you’re dialling or the text messages you’re sending. A definite step up from what the classic Nokia 3210 (or any other phone of that era) could manage. The physical button controls on the Nokia 3210 aren’t the largest on a feature phone, which could have an impact on your use of the device if you’ve got digital dexterity issues, however.

I often get asked about call quality on these kinds of phones, and it’s always a tough one to judge – not because I’m not willing to test, but because voice quality here is one part handset, one part network. The Nokia 3210 is 4G capable for calls – so it dodges the issues around the impending 3G shutdown here in Australia if that matters to you – and in my tests was decent without being exceptional for voice call quality.

The inbuilt microphones deliver a rather tinny sound even with my slightly deeper voice, and while that’s accurate for a retro throwback phone, it’s perhaps not ideal – but then in the feature phone space you’re not exactly awash with choices.

While other features might not be critical to your buying decision, you do get a range of simple tools – hidden away under the extras menu – for services such as a simple timer, unit conversion and a calculator.

Radio is also supported, though it’s recommended that you do so with headphones on. That’s both a good idea from a politeness point of view, but also because the headphone cable will help a lot with radio reception, forming part of the antenna when you do so.

If you want the Nokia 3210 as a digital detox device

If you’re looking for a device that’ll get you away from your social media addictions – or out of range of work emails – then the Nokia 3210 could do the trick, but primarily due to annoyance rather than being a compelling digital detox device.

Why?

Primarily because the additional non-phone features are either basic, slow or so terrible to use that you’re not likely to bother beyond Snake.

You do get a range of other games on the device, but more than half of them are only game demos that have to be purchased if you want to play them more than 3 times. One amusing aspect here is how you pay; if you wanted Doodle Jump for the Nokia 3210, it’ll cost you the price of 10 international SMS… which means it could vary widely depending on your actual telco!

Spoiler: I did not bother buying Doodle Jump.

There’s also an Internet browser built in, in this case Opera Mini. It tries, bless it, but it’s an awful way to browse the modern web, especially as you have to use T9 texting to enter URLs or search queries, then multiple taps around tiny screens to find the content you want. I’d only use it in an absolute emergency.

For a digital detox device it’s also deeply weird that Facebook is present, because if you do want to get away from it all, Facebook is undoubtedly part of that “all”. Again, though, the limitations of the way you’d have to scroll Facebook make it a deeply annoying process.

For whatever reason, it always comes up when I write a Nokia feature phone review as to whether or not WhatsApp is supported. It isn’t; there’s no onboard app store at all for the Nokia 3210, and while you can update its software through the settings menu, that’s only ever going to deliver the apps that HMD Global decides it wants on the phone.

One way that the Nokia 3210 would assist in your digital detox – and this isn’t new for HMD’s Nokia feature phones – is that there’s no support for Wi-Fi connectivity at all. The only data that you could get into the Nokia 3210 is going to come from your SIM card, period.

Diving into the Nokia 3210's storage -- which was how I worked out how limited its storage truly is -- also showed off an ebook folder, which felt like a neat idea. Neat in theory, but again annoying in implementation, as standard ebook formats when copied to the Nokia 3210 simply complained that I didn't have the right app, because it only really supports eBooks if they're in plain text format. This is not a great reading experience, to the surprise of nobody.

Battery

The Nokia 3210 runs from a 1450mAh battery, which is astonishingly small by 2024 standards, though it doesn’t really matter all that much when it comes down to real world use. Like its classic forebears, it’s perfectly feasible to get 5 or more days of battery life out of the Nokia 3210, and it’s not hard to see why.

Unlike a modern smartphone, the Nokia 3210 really isn’t doing much a whole lot of the time, apart from seeking out mobile towers for calls.

The screen defaults to off very rapidly by default, and the inbuilt apps and processor are not, to put it politely, particularly heavy duty when it comes to battery usage.

Your limited inputs into the Nokia 3210 are also likely to ensure that you don’t use it all that much in a heavy duty way, either, further enhancing battery endurance.

While I didn’t test it with hours and hours of calls, if you are a serious mobile chatterbug, it’s officially rated for up to 9.8 hours of calls.

While I appreciate the switch to USB-C – which means that other USB-C chargers should work just fine with the Nokia 3210 – it’s likely to be a little more problematic for some of the phone’s target market that it doesn’t come with a charger at all, just a USB-C charging cable.

Yes, it's an upgrade from the microUSB used on the Nokia 2660 Flip -- but that phone actually came with a charger too.

Nokia 3210: Alex’s Verdict

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Like the Nokia 2660 Flip before it, the Nokia 3210 is a tool with a rather specific purpose.

Is it the ideal phone for me, personally? No, not at all in any way, but it would be daft for me to say that it’s a bad phone on that basis, because my own phone wants and needs are quite radically different.

For the market that just wants a phone-as-a-phone, the Nokia 3210 would fit the bill pretty nicely. The battery life is good, call quality (as much as I can measure it) is fine, and it’s all nicely simple.

It’s not the most physically robust unit, however, and the smaller buttons could be an issue for some simpler phone users.

For the digital detox market, it would likewise work, but the way it implements its additional functions largely weans you away from those addictions simply because they’re just so darned annoying to use.

I could totally see the market for an even simpler digital detox device that omitted them entirely, because that would at least not poke at you pointing out the experiences you could be having if it wasn’t so limited.

In detox terms, it’s rather like shoving a big bag of heroin in front of a junkie’s face, then pointing out it’s in a completely impenetrable bag. That doesn't feel so much like detox as reinforcing an addiction, ultimately.

Nokia 3210: Pricing and availability

The Nokia 3210 retails in Australia for $129.

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