The retro Nokia phone everyone owned 25 years ago will get a reboot soon

HMD’s rumored remake of the classic Nokia 3210 has now fully leaked
The original 3210 is one of the biggest-selling phones of all time
Remake combines nods to its design with modern touches like a camera

HMD may have just launched its own mid-range smartphones, but that doesn’t mean it’s exiting Nokia nostalgia business – quite the opposite, as a new leak has fully revealed its imminent reboot of one of Nokia’s most-loved phones.

The Nokia 3210 was first launched back in 1999 and became known as the ‘mobile’ that virtually everyone seemed to own. HMD recently hinted on X (formerly Twitter) that it’d be rebooting a Nokia classic soon – and thanks to the Finnish retailer Giganti (via NokiaMob), we now know that it’ll be a remake of the 3210.

Looking a little more colorful than the functional grey dumbphone we remember, the reborn Nokia 3210 will apparently be officially launched on May 8 (with an on-sale date of May 15). The design isn’t exactly a faithful replica – there are similarities in the button layout, but it’s otherwise arguably closer to a Nokia 3310 from the early 2000s.

Still, we like the cyan and yellow color options and the ‘new’ Nokia 3210 is sprinkled with a few more modern features to make it feel less like a relic from a bygone age. The leaked specs include a 2.4-inch QVGA color screen (a slight upgrade from the original’s 1.5-inch monochrome display) and the addition of a 2MP f/2.8 camera on the back that can shoot 720p video.

Those features, plus the addition of 4G connectivity, mean the 3210’s battery life probably won’t be as ridiculously long as the original’s. But a 1,450 mAh battery should keep it going for days and, most importantly, a separate teaser from HMD has confirmed that the phone will of course have Snake.

According to the Giganti leak, the phone’s price should also be refreshingly retro, with it expected to cost €89 (around $95 / £76 / AU$145) when it hits shelves from May 15 – though we may have to wait for the official launch to find out exactly where it’s going on sale.

Why was the Nokia 3210 so popular?

A Nokia 3210 sitting on a grey background — (Image credit: Basic.Master)

This is far from the first time that HMD has remade a popular Nokia classic (we recently saw it announce a trio of tributes to 2000s-era candybar phones), but there is something particularly special about the Nokia 3210 for those who remember it.

The seemingly indestructible classic celebrated its 25th birthday recently on March 18 and it came from an era when Nokia utterly dominated ‘mobile phones’, which made the 3210 the iPhone of its time. There were 160 million of them in the wild in 1999, according to Wikipedia.

As I reminisced in TechRadar’s misty-eyed look back at the team’s first phones, the 3210 didn’t do a whole lot more than send texts, let me play Snake and last for weeks without charging.

But it was also one of the first mainstream phones that didn’t have an external antenna. The design was apparently inspired by both Casio G-Shock watches and the Sony Walkman, which explains its utilitarian looks.

Subsequent phones got a lot more colorful and feature-packed, but the 3210 was arguably peak dumbphone – and while HMD’s remake isn’t exactly a faithful tribute, I’m happy to see the phone return, in spirit at least, as a reminder of a time when endless doomscrolling wasn’t such a dangerous wormhole.