Shoutout to the guy who gave me his old Nokia 3310 at a garage sale

I was at a garage sale last weekend in my neighborhood here in Austin, and this older guy had a box of old phones for like $2 each. I picked up this beat up Nokia 3310 that still had the original battery and everything. He told me he bought it in 2002 and used it for almost 8 years before switching to a smartphone. I charged it up when I got home and it still turns on and makes calls, though the screen has a weird scratch on it. The thing is built like a brick and I kind of want to switch to it for a month as a dumb phone experiment. Has anyone else tried going back to a basic phone just for calls and texts? I'm curious if the battery life is still decent on these old bricks or if I'm going to be stuck carrying a charger everywhere.

4 comments

4 Comments

jamie_webb671mo agoTop Commenter

@river952 brings up a good point about maps, but the real hidden trick with old Nokias is that they make incredible backup GPS devices if you still have a standalone unit or printed directions. The battery on those 3310s is almost legendary for lasting a full week on standby even now, but the catch is the original battery chemistry degrades over time so you might only get a day or two of actual talking before it dies. What nobody mentions is that you can replace the battery on those things with a cheap aftermarket one from Amazon for like $8, and suddenly you have a phone that goes for a week again. The real downside of switching full time isn't the battery, its the fact that voice minutes on modern plans are practically unlimited but texting on T9 is like watching paint dry.

river9521mo ago

Oh man, that brings back memories of when I found a old Motorola flip phone at a thrift store in San Antonio a few years back. It had this crazy cracked screen but the charger still worked and I tried using it for a week. The battery actually lasted like three days even with the screen glitching out, but I kept missing calls because the ringtone was so quiet and weird sounding. I ended up going back to my smartphone because I couldn't handle not having Google Maps for finding my way around the city. Have you checked if the Nokia can still hold a charge after all these years, or did the battery just crap out completely?

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kai_webb911mo ago

Wait, three days? Ngl that sounds insane for an old flip phone battery, especially one with a cracked screen. I remember those Motorola batteries were like little bricks, but three days of actual use still feels unreal. Tbh most of the old phones I dug up from my grandpa's closet had batteries that swelled up or just refused to charge at all. The Nokia I found didn't even power on for more than like 10 minutes before dying, so I just stuck it on a shelf for decoration. Honestly missing calls because of a quiet ringtone is such a classic old phone problem too. I bet you could've gotten away with texting on it if the T9 word prediction wasn't so painfully slow, though.

samflores1mo ago

Man that sucks about the Nokia. I had an old phone do the exact same thing to me, fired it up for nostalgia and it died before I could even send a text. Feels like a waste when you find one in decent shape and the battery just gives up.