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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

Sure, the classic UI in 3310 etc ("Series 20") was great, and even "Series 30" was okay. But Series 40 and especially Series 60 were distinctly less well received.

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I'm a weirdo who has intentionally never owned a smartphone, so "using up" old dumb phones found in our family has been a fun hobby for roughly two decades. Longest streak was using a 3310 for 12-or-so years, starting when I went to gymnasium and letting it go in late 20s when I was about to become a father. Man, that was one hell of a phone (also serving as a beer bottle opener, etc for many students back in the day).

Looking back, I can't emphasize how much I loved the 3310 UI. Clean, fast, no colors, simply perfect. I'm currently using a Nokia 2600 Classic [1] with Symbian; it feels incredibly slow and cumbersome as compared to the 3310. Literally having to watch a progress bar while the phone's calculator(!) is loading.

But, that darned 2600 also refuses do die (it was already showing dead pixels, so there was some hope in the meanwhile), so I estimate being stuck with this one in the years to come also.

Another fun UI was from a Big Button Phone For Elderly People that belonged to my grandpa. I think it's a ZTE s202 [2]. Unfortunately, the microphone gave up working, so I ditched it.

That world of Old Dumb Phones is actually a lot of fun. And -- it's odd to think how much outdated-but-entirely-usable electronic waste there actually is on the planet.

Thanks, Finns, for enriching the world with the rock-solid 3310, and greetings from the other side of the gulf!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_2600_classic

2: https://i.hinnavaatlus.ee/p/1200/99/43/S20220must__6ee8.jpg

> I'm currently using a Nokia 2600 Classic [1] with Symbian

There's no Symbian on that phone. Symbian was pretty much a smartphone OS that didn't really show up on feature phones. It had a full-blown WebKit browser, native apps, multitasking, productivity suites... you could even install Python interpreter and play with writing apps this way on Symbian phones from around that time (which is what I kept borrowing my mom's E65 for). Later versions even had Qt built-in.

Nokia 2600 Classic used one of the iterations of Series 40. Looking at the videos, it indeed appears rather slow on this phone.

My apologies, and thanks very much for the correction. On another note, has there ever been any custom OSes for the late 2000s era Nokia dumb phones, built by some stubborn hackers? Or some modification software to hand-tailor the Series 40 iterations, e.g remove features the user doesn't need. That would make these phones fun to mess with.

The 3310 was the culmination of Nokia's really good UX work. Symbian convoluted all that and made it a big mess. The manuals for symbian phones were thick and heavy and mostly no one except the engineer-natured people could actually use most of the features.

At least in Finland just having the more expensive phones was seen as a status symbol and usually people were using them for calling, smses and perhaps for emails.

S30 came years after S40 and only targeted low-end. S40 was a rather well-received UI, but neither it nor S30 were ever used on smartphones. The only UI used with Symbian from what you mentioned was S60 and yes, it didn't have a reputation of being particularly clean.

That said, S40 was being used on feature phones for more than a decade (from Nokia 7110 in 1999 up to Nokia 515 from 2013), so it spanned across multiple UI generations and while it was very successful initially, at the end of its lifespan it didn't do particularly well when put on models with big touchscreens.

I had an S40 phone (Nokia 6300) for several years, and I don't recall anything unpleasant about it.

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