Nokia 3310 3G as a podcast player | Hacker News Reader

Nokia 3310 3G as a podcast player

prog.re

35 pointsprogre69 comments

I just rediscovered my 5th Gen iPod Video...after a $12 battery swap, I have uninterrupted high fidelity music in over the ear headphones has been a revelation.

-No interruptions from IMs, SMS, Facebook, Linked In, Slack, GCN, Ring, Nest, Apple+, Farmville, Solitaire, or any other application that thinks it must get a hold of your attention

-It's a timecapsule of 2005 and before - When I curated my music myself...I had to like a song, and then Star it to make it to my player

-Works everywhere, completely offline

-I found myself REALLY listening to music again...and the notifications I needed while WFH generally had a visual component, too, so I could opt to respond to that meeting or join that Teams Chat without necessarily interrupting the music.

-It dropped me back into iTunes Music (or ITunes...or Music...or whatever it's branded now) which is a much bigger view of my music that you just don't get looking at an iPhone screen.

I'm pretty sure it's a two week distraction (because holy-smokes, that cable catches on EVERYTHING) but it's a fun one.

> No interruptions from IMs, SMS, Facebook, Linked In, Slack, GCN, Ring, Nest, Apple+, Farmville, Solitaire, or any other application that thinks it must get a hold of your attention

Unwanted notifications are not a vice like snacking or the like where obviously you get some endorphins every time you do it and therefore you can get addicted, and thus it makes sense to "restrict access to sources of food" when you are trying to avoid it (e.g. self-control issues).

No. _Unwanted_ notifications is something that is by definition not possible to get addicted to, so I really don't get this point of view.

Just turn them off, dammit. Like you can in any operating system ever designed (so far) and then they are off. There's no need to go around fishing for a device which has no support for notifications.

But I've seen a shitton of people saying they prefer this "dumbed down" device or the like for precisely this reason, which is absurd. Battery life, I get. Less maintenance, I might get. But "avoiding notifications", I don't get.

I have a cheap no-name Android device as bed-side alarm clock since they are actually _cheaper_ than (off-shelf) bed-side alarm clocks and I can write my own alarm clock program for them (a big plus). I put it on Don't disturb mode the day I booted it for the first time. Never got a notification. Never woke me up in the middle of the night (unwantedly ;P ).

Turning stuff off isn't easy when there are so many different sources for them. I want to have important notifications that I write down myself, but turning off all the other notifications has broken that for me. I get a 50-50 whether a given notification that I wrote myself will actually work for me. And all because I tried turning off notifications for things that I don't ever want to see a notification from.

I’m not stupid. It’s the gamification of attention I’m done with. The iPod predates that, it returns control to me without ads between curated song lists, “app wants to send you notifications”, you could get premium for just $2 a month!

You can absolutely turn it all off. But with the iPod, I didn’t have to.

Actually, you have to turn those _on_, usually. Its not that by default it will start spamming you about programs you did not install on in the first place.

> Unwanted notifications are not a vice like snacking or the like where obviously you get some endorphins every time you do it and therefore you can get addicted

Except they’re not unwanted, at least not completely.

Sometimes apps don’t let you decide what you’ll get sent, so that you get a mix of wanted and unwanted notifications. Other times one just can’t resist looking at them.

You can argue as to what brain chemistry causes this to resemble an addiction, but you can’t argue that they have an addictive, attention hogging effect for many.

> Just turn them off, dammit.

The ease by which this is reversible and the habit of checking apps is the problem with this solution.

> self-control issues

This is such an unrealistic expectation. This is always the go-to argument as well - pinning the blame on the user.

Thousands of engineers design these apps to be addictive. Most people aren’t going to win against that.

Furthermore, few other things in life are designed to do hog attention like these apps are. They can only be compared to slot machines which clearly have a strong effect on people.

> Except they’re not unwanted, at least not completely.

I explicitly called them "Unwanted" because the post I'm replying to mentions getting a plain old iPod (with no notifications whatsoever) as an alternative. If you _want_ these notifications, then my argument does not apply.

> If you _want_ these notifications, then my argument does not apply.

Then your argument has a very minimal reach and doesn’t apply to the post you replied to.

Few apps have irrelevant and useless notifications. They usually have some relevance or use.

Many apps, especially social media, play on reward centers to form addictive behavior. They are wanted in the sense that they are irresistible and are sometimes useful.

The realization that they are troublesome makes them unwanted while still being irresistible.

In which way it does not apply to the post I replied to? In which way would using a plain iPod -which now filters out all notifications, including the ones you actually want to receive- help if you have wanted notifications? That's the idiotic part. There is no "wanted" notification in this context. The poster just generically finds all notifications useless.

If you are an addict to Facebook, I could understand buying a phone-network-capable device without the ability to install Facebook (the iPod isn't), or a child phone, or using parental controls on yourself (seen it); to enhance your self-control while still allowing access to work/family/whatever notifications. However, if you just don't want to receive notifications whatsoever, what's the point? There's no addiction here. You are talking about a different topic entirely.

You can do all these things on a modern phone, no need to dig out the Sansa, iPod or Nokia. Assuming you have a media collection at home and a working internet connection you just get any SBC - Raspberry Pi etc - and hang it off that internet connection. Install Airsonic or a similar media streamer, point it at your media collection. Install DSub or a similar Subsonic/Airsonic client on your devices and point these at your media streamer. There you go, self-curated music in your ears. Tell all those interruption-producing programs to shut up by either (the best solution) turning off sync, turning down notification volume to 0 or denying them access to notifications -> poof, no interruptions. People can still call you of course, you could turn that off as well if you want.

There is no need to go back in time to get more control, all it takes it for you to take over the reins of current technology. The added advantage of doing so is a reduced stress load since you get to realise that you actually can take control.

You just gave a laundry list of things to do, including buying a device that's worth as much as a used iPod. And to make matters worse, this is something you have to constantly keep on top of any time you install new apps. Otherwise those will throw notifications at you and you cab accidentally end up blocking notifications you do want.

That "device that's worth as much as a used iPod" costs ~$40 including a power supply and has the potential to do far more than just allow you to play music without notifications (which was already possible on your phone). It can help you gain freedom on the 'net in general, not just play some music.

If you turn down notification sounds or just switch the things off altogether you will not get notifications from any apps, new or old.

In short, why complicate things by carrying around another device when you can put that effort into creating a single device which can help achieve digital freedom? In both cases you'll have to do some work, either by scouring the 'net (or thrift stores) for older equipment which can be refurbished or by building a 'personal server' (which could also be achieved using an old laptop which will give you higher performance but will use more power).

There's something relating the depth/quality/density of experience there.

You do less but you feel more, is that right ?

Yes. It’s music..your music...and nothing else, poured directly into your brain.

not only that but the fact that people used to take pleasure in curating less quantity

today is all about more music without having to even try, things done 'for' you, less work..

I don't have the time or mental budget to 'curate' music, I want some algorithms to do that for me and create a mix of genres and artists that it thinks I'll like.

In the absence of that I'd rather do without music, it's just not a high priority for me.

I didn’t swear off my smartphone. I have and use that, too. It’s not an either/or, it’s an and.

I use an old Moto E4 as my "entertainment center". I just removed all the extra apps I've installed over the months of usage, kept only Spotify, Google Podcasts, and the Action Blocks apps.

The phone is always connected to wifi and a Bluetooth speaker. ALL notifications are off so when I fire it to play a podcast or song, nothing interrupts me.

Also, I use this phone as my alarm clock. Using my daily driver phone was problematic as I usually end up opening facebook/twitter/reddit when I wake and wasting valuable time. The Moto E has none of those.

> I was on reddit (back when the mobile website worked)

Those were the days, i.reddit.com is still sort of ok on mobile devices

I guess, but I have sort of lost interest in reddit anyway. They can do whatever they like to their webpage, I'm out. The only thing I really miss are the in-jokes that HN really don't like. I drift more and more to youtube instead, I even read the comments there sometimes (!).

Someone please make a front end to Reddit that removes all garbage.

> I even read the comments there sometimes (!)

Some of those youtube comments are pure gold IMO. I guess youtube has its fair share of toxic comments as well (as most social media), but it's somewhat strange that youtube got famous for its horrid comment sections.

I got an older middle class Android phone with a Snapdragon 660. Using i.reddit.com is lightning fast: I can open the comments over 3G as fast as old.reddit.com on my desktop PC with a 1 Gbit connection.

Meanwhile the new reddit that loads when I want to watch a v.reddit.com video takes like 10 seconds until I can watch the video in that laggy thing they dare to call a video player. Just opening comments of a self submission (text only) takes 5 seconds. And on top of that: browsing the new reddit experience drains my battery extremely quickly.

Once i.reddit.com gets turned off, I will leave reddit for good just because the new website is unbearable.

100% agreed, the new versions of the site; especially the mobile version is unbearably slow

> BankID used to be only a bank issued smart card and a special little card reader.

If you had the right bank. If you had the wrong bank it was a Windows-only application with the kind of yankiness that screams "I have more holes than a Swiss cheese".

I may not particularly like mobile bankid (mostly for the same reason I didn't like desktop bankid), but I have a lot more control over what permissions it has, at least.

It bothers me that these apps like BankID don't work on rooted phones. I should be allowed to control and choose what I share with any app.

To use this, I had to install it on a dedicated older phone, and I'm running out of older phones to run stuff on...

For a long time I used a Nokia 104, rather than getting a smart phone, it was great. For work I got an iPhone, and there’s no way I’m carrying two phones, so the Nokia ends up in the draw of mystery tech. Now four years later I really want to go back, but I still need a few apps for work and MobilePay has become a must have in Denmark. The first phone companies have started shutting down 2G so in a year or so I can’t even be sure that the old phone will work. There’s still not total 3G, 4G or 5G coverage so I also can’t be sure the iPhone will work.

It’s becoming extremely difficult to not wanting a smart phone. We heading towards an App-only world.

In my country (Tunisia), carriers are starting to shut down 3G networks, but not 2G. These are used as a sort of an IoT network that companies can use to communicate with connected devices all over the country.

I don't know why but I find this cool in a nerdy way.

That IS kinda cool. Denmark is shutting down 2G and 3G, because the frequencies are to be reused for 5G and 5G is what IoT will use.

I’m honestly more interested in IoT on 2G. For most things it should be fast enough.

On the app-front I've actually noticed an opposite direction in that I'm using fewer and fewer of these by moving more and more to web-versions of the services offered by apps. What apps I'm still using are mostly free software, often connected to services under my own control. I don't use apps because I don't see the need for all those app providers to get access to more of my data than necessary for the services they render and because I don't like the Balkanisation caused by the app world. While Android and iOS may divide more or less the entire mobile world between them I want to keep the door open to new contenders, preferably of the free software variety. An app-only world is an effective blockade for new contenders and as such only serves the incumbents.

I live in Sweden where as you probably know electronic payments are big, with Swish being the overweight gorilla in this field. I don't use Swish or any other electronic payment platform yet I still manage to get around, cash still works where it matters. My reasoning for using cash is the same as before, I like my privacy and don't see the need for the bank and the state and several advertisers to know I bought object A at location B from vendor C for price D at date and time E. Cash makes this possible, electronic payments do the opposite.

You will see several post from me regarding native vs mobile Web leaning on the native side, but the fact is that unless one is doing games or requires access to hardware specific capabilities, most stuff is actually doable as web app, specially with Google increasingly pushing ChromeOS features into Chrome.

I have one of these candy bar style Nokia phones, and its surprisingly good, but warning to the user: they don't work on 3G..

This isn't a problem unless your provider no longer supports 2G which is the case with the aptly named "3" provider. (Both in Sweden and the UK).

Getting a payG SIM card for another provider isn't too much of a pain but I bought this as a backup for my main phone and only noticed it in an emergency. :(

Other nitpick quirks include: being able to unlock the device with one keypress (when locking is at least 2 keypresses) and no discernible way to update the firmware.

The 3310 3G works on 3G and is in fact on the "3" provider right now. But the warning is still relevant. When shopping around for the 3310 I saw some stores selling the slightly older 2017 version 3310 that has only 2G for the same price as the 2020 3310 3G.

I'm pretty sure the OP's modern feature phone, which is named the "3310 3G" after all, works on 3G.

The OP author seems to be Swedish, too.

For an actual old phone though, sure it'd be an issue.

I’m talking about the 2017 re-release. But it seems there is a new(er) 3G variant too!

Something old featurephones also had was tactile buttons. Can be controlled without looking. I miss that.

Yes! I haven't had to use the 3310 with mittens on yet but I imagine it will be a lot easier than a touch screen.

I was in high school when the first iPhone came out. Before any of us got a smartphone I had a friend who knew T9 so well that she could type out an entire SMS to someone while in class without looking at the screen. So she would reach down in her pocket and pick up her phone and she’d be holding the phone by her side and she’d be typing out a message but she’d be looking at the blackboard, the teacher, and her desk while typing so you couldn’t even tell that she was typing from where the teacher was standing. I found that pretty impressive. I asked her about it and she said it was no biggie, she’d just been typing a lot and therefore she had learned how to do this without really trying to learn it.

My kid brother and a couple of his friends had this skill, too. Between that and being thoroughly spanked in multiplayer games, and taught the joys of Homestarrunner by them, I felt really old. (Early 20s then.)

I'm thinking of building a tiny keyboard using something like an Arduino Leonardo which could then be plugged in (as a USB HID) to an android phone.

I sometimes go camping or hillwalking and although an Apple Watch and iPhone can be kept going for a few days with a battery bank, it’s not entirely ideal.

So i bought a 3310 or 3330 i forget which. It even came with headphones and I put on my old gshock watch.

Signal reception is not as good as an iphone but otherwise pretty ideal for hillwalking and maybe an overnight camp.

I can’t really fault the cheap nokias for that use case. I was so impressed that I decided to try using it as a daily for a week and see how i got on - i was going through a periodic prune of notifications in my life at the time, a digital detox so to speak.

Need to quickly transfer money? Nope. Phone banking is stupidly slow.

Want to check the weather? Yeah but no.

Want to search your email for that thing. Nope.

Hey quick, snap a picture of that. Nope.

Todo list? Nope.

Calendar? Nope.

Lookup a password or pin code? Nope.

Read something. Nope.

Take a quick note.

Check the price of something.

How far away is X?

No. No. No.

I didn’t even last a full day :-) i still do think it’s pretty good as a backup or for hillwalking.

Back in the day I ran a few WAP[1] sites for 'feature phones' - I wonder if these nokias can still connect to the internet (over the cell network) and access WAP sites? I've got the archive of my stuff somewhere....

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol

I don't think I have seen any WAP things for the 3310 but it does have a Opera Mini browser, so regular old (no-js) web surfing is still possible. The rendering engine is even somewhat competent, but since the screen is something like 10x10 pixels you have too zoom into the pages and move around your little zoom-box to read anything.

Most sites enforce TLS 1.2 nowadays, and it's likely that the root certificates are expired, or the browser only supports up to TLS 1.0.

Opera Mini is proxying stuff, so they would likely work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAAUuy0n4r8

I hear you, I still need both phones. But the 3310 is the one in my pocket, Samsung stays in the bag until it's called for.

Next time take a Nokia 6220:

+ HSDPA-3.6M/10.2M/ WCDMA-900/2100 / DTM EGPRS-850/900 /1800/1900 Class 11A/32B

+ GPS navigation with Assisted GPS

+ Symbian OS 9.3 with the S60 interface 3rd Edition.

+ Secondary frontal camera for video phone calls (CIF+ resolution).

+ 2.5 mm headjack for supplied headset.

+ Micro USB connector.

+ Bluetooth version 2.0 with A2DP profile.

+ MicroSD SDHC card slot.

+ Stereo FM radio with support for Visual Radio and RDS.

+ Audio player supporting MP3, M4A, eAAC+, RealAudio 7,8,10, and WMA formats.

+ 5.0-megapixel camera with autofocus, Carl Zeiss lens and Xenon flash.

+ Video recording-VGA 640×480 @ 30 fps.

+ H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, H.263, RealVideo 7,8,9/10 support.

+ Java MIDP 2.1

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_6220_Classic.

Ah, and it should last up to three days without intensive use.

> Ah, and it should last up to three days without intensive use.

That is not impressive at all. I can get more from my 2 year old Nokia running Android 10.

Right now the phone says 1.5 days since last charge and 2 days remaining with my current usage.

It took Android 10 years, two major projects (Volta and Butter), alongside multiple iterations of Doze mode, adding restrictions to background execution of Android services, to finally catch up with Nokia phones from 2008.

Impressive is how we ended up with something like Android taking over the world of mobile devices, thanks to mismanagement from competition side, and a free beer OS.

Do not ignore that the smartphone has a big power hungry display and is always connected and syncing tons of stuff in the background.

Also, 4G drains battery much faster than 3G.

I can also give Nokia 808 PureView or Nokia N900 as example.

Symbian phones were smartphones, with a mikro-kernel and plenty of multiprocessing capabilities via active objects.

And Nokia N900 was based on Linux.

Time to learn that smartphones did not start with iPhone.

You are trying to pick up a fight where there is none.

Phones today have to do much more than phoned 15 years ago, hence worse battery life. Just compare the battery life of the 808 and the N9.

I wasn't the one doing Android advertising without understanding what was already possible before it came into the world.

Phones 12 years ago did exactly the same as today, only not for the generation that thinks iPhone created the smartphone. 2020 - 2008 => 12, just for info

Even app stores were already a thing, just controlled by mobile operators with margins up to 80%, which makes Apple's 30% that everyone complains a very generous value.

Oh what I wouldn't give for small screen phones that do just enough on the go. I had a 6301 which had Wifi with good enough maps/email/audio that I kept using well after Android/iOS came out. Add a GPS and a better camera of the 6220 and I would have never given it up.

Isn't that the point of a digital detox (or at least of buying a "dumb"phone in the smartphone era)? That you won't be able to do any of those things?

Nah these are essentials. The detox is the non-essential stuff that just accumulates over time.

Ping! New podcast episode downloaded.

Ping! We think you just visited XXX, leave a review!

Ping! See what's been happening on instagram

Ping! ...

Why would you want to do any of those things while camping or hiking? You are outdoors, surrounded by nature and, perhaps, people you appreciate the company of; enjoy it! Live in the moment!

I wouldn't, you misread :-)

You are right, Craig. I'm sorry. Can we be smartphone-averse friends?

Not to deride the post, but if you’re willing to carry your smartphone and a feature-phone, wouldn’t it be about the same to carry your smartphone and a power-bank / battery-case of equivalent weight to said feature-phone?

Sure, that would stretch the battery time to maybe 2 days. But I still would have to have both of those in my pocket. Now I get 4-5 days on my smaller pocket phone and the Android stays in the backpack.

> But I would still have to have both of those in my pocket.

At the height of the Pokemon Go craze, people were carrying large batteries around in their backpacks, with a long wire snaked out of the backpack between the zippers to the phone in their pocket. Not the most practical thing, but it worked.

It's kind of funny; the next season after that, many backpack manufacturers re-introduced the flapped-seal cable pass-through port that had previously gone out of fashion (it used to be a thing for people who were feeding their headphones into their bag to listen to music from their walkman or discman — not pocketable devices, for most definitions of "pocket.") But by the time the backpack makers did this, the craze was already over.

While we're talking alternatives, another alternative is to activate your smartphone's "Battery Saver mode" permanently, and then disable things like Wi-fi (so it isn't searching for a signal when you're out and about); Bluetooth (I assume, if you're okay with the Nokia, you aren't a Bluetooth headphone enthusiast); and — if you really want to go all-out, and "people phoning you" isn't generally a thing — find an app that will automatically disable the cellular radio whenever the phone's locked/asleep. (Which would wreak havoc on battery life if you woke your phone up all the time, but is great if you only wake it up a few times per hour at most.)

I've been able to pull a good few days of battery life from some rather old phones this way.

Very cool. If this had a way to count steps, it would have been an ideal podcast companion for me given I really don't enjoy notifications when I walk

> I'm not sure why podcasts in particular are so hard on the battery, it seemed that about equal time on Spotify would not drain it nearly as much. I suspect that the fact that the podcast files are stored on a external SD card has something to do with it.

So why not just get rid of that SD card and try another app for podcasts, maybe even Spotify since you already use it with better results?

I'm in a fairly rural place and I'm often in places without 3G coverage, so streaming anything is right out. I doubt that another podcast app would handle the storage any better, but it's true, I don't know that. I was using Antennapod.

Yeah, if it wasn't for the hardware having failed on me, even some old Symbian Belle phone would be more than enough.

Not sure what the 3310 3G runs, but if it's series 40 it has a lot of annoying bugs. One of them being that removing the headphone jack doesn't pause the music but actually continues playing the music on the stereo. I tried using an earlier Nokia feature phone but that drove me nuts, together with some odd quirks.

The info from the phone says OS version MOCOR_W19.6.3. Supposedly this is something diffrent from the Series 30+ that the 2G version of the phone runs. Anyway, it seems rock solid, haven't really had any bugs at all. The resume works, unplugging the headphones stops the playback.

Also the sales material harps on and on about how the phone has the snake game. Witch it has. But it also has a real licensed Tetris game

Best player I had is Sansa Clip+ with Rockbox FW and 64 GB MicroSD

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