What made the Nokia 3310 sell 126 million units?
Nokia announced the Nokia 3310 on September 1, 2000, at a lifestyle event in Oberhausen, Germany, and put it on sale in the fourth quarter of that year. It replaced the Nokia 3210 of 1999, and it was aimed at teenagers rather than executives. The announcement said the phone was built "for young people and the young at heart, for whom the mobile phone is an important lifestyle accessory."
The feature Nokia led with was not the hardware. It was chat: a view that grouped text messages from one contact into a running back-and-forth so a conversation read as a thread. Nokia sold that as mobile chat you could carry around. Every messaging app since has used the same layout, which makes the Nokia 3310 an odd sort of ancestor to the apps that eventually buried it.
Nokia was the largest phone maker in the world when the Nokia 3310 shipped, and this became its best-known handset. It sold 126 million units before Nokia discontinued it in 2005. That is a five-year production run for a single consumer phone, at a time when the company was shipping a new model every few months.
Why did the Nokia 3310 survive drops that break phones?
Nokia never advertised the Nokia 3310 as indestructible. That reputation was built by owners over about a decade, and it is the reason the phone became a meme long after it left shops. The engineering behind it is unremarkable once you list it out: there was almost nothing on the device that could break.
The display was monochrome and sat behind a thick plastic window, so there was no glass to spider and no touch layer to fail. There was no camera lens. The phone weighed 133 grams and measured 113 by 48 by 22 millimeters, which meant a dense block with very little empty space inside for components to rattle around in. The 900 mAh nickel metal hydride battery was rated for up to 260 hours of standby, so owners charged it once a week and mostly forgot about it.
The covers helped too. Because the front and back shells were designed to come off in an owner's hands, nothing structural was glued. A phone built to be opened by a 15-year-old in a school corridor is a phone that survives being dropped on one.
How did Snake II and the Xpress-on covers change what a phone was?
The Nokia 3310 shipped with four games: Snake II, Pairs II, Space Impact and Bantumi, a version of the board game mancala. Snake had been on Nokia phones since 1997, but the 3310 is the model that made it a shared reference, because the 3310 was the phone everyone in a given classroom or office had. Nokia's later run at a dedicated gaming handset, the Nokia N-Gage, never got close to the same reach.
The Xpress-on covers did something subtler. Swapping the shell let an owner change the look of the phone without replacing it, and it created a third-party accessory trade in patterns, team badges and fake chrome. That is the phone case industry, running a decade before anyone called it that.
Text entry mattered as much. The Nokia 3310 supported T9 predictive text, which cut the number of keypresses per word roughly in half compared with tapping each letter out. Put predictive text, a threaded chat view and a keypad people learned by feel in one cheap handset, and SMS stops being a carrier feature and becomes how a generation talks.
Who owns the Nokia 3310 name in 2026?
Nokia Corporation owns the brand and has not built its own handsets for years; the Nokia name on a phone has been a licence since it sold the handset business off, which is the short answer to whether Nokia still makes phones. HMD Global, a Finnish company set up by former Nokia staff, took that licence in 2016 and used the 3310 to announce itself.
HMD Global unveiled a new Nokia 3310 at Mobile World Congress on February 26, 2017, priced at about $52, with a color screen, a 2 megapixel camera and Snake. It was the biggest story of the show. Chief executive Arto Nummela told CNBC in 2017 how the decision was made: "And then we thought, ok, what the heck, lets have some fun and create this." A 3G version followed in October 2017, because the first one was 2G only.
The licence has since narrowed. HMD Global stopped selling new Nokia phones in the United States in July 2025, citing a "challenging geopolitical and economic environment," and its exclusive licence for Nokia-branded devices expired in March 2026. In September 2025 the two companies extended a smaller feature-phone licence by about three years, to 2029, and only in a limited set of markets led by India and the Middle East.
What does an original Nokia 3310 cost, and will it make a call?
It will not, at least not in the United States. The original Nokia 3310 is a 2G GSM phone, and there is no 2G GSM network left to register on. AT&T switched its 2G network off in 2017. T-Mobile ran the last one and closed it on August 3, 2026. A working Nokia 3310 in 2026 is a device that boots, keeps time, holds a charge for days and plays Snake II, with no way to dial out. Buyers in the UK, Canada and Australia should check their own carrier's 2G timetable before assuming otherwise.
Where to find one today: refurbished handsets and complete collector sets both turn up on Etsy, where sets with the original box, manual and a fresh battery were listed at around $200 in September 2026. Bare handsets in working condition sell for a fraction of that. Look for a seller who states that the battery has been replaced, because a nickel metal hydride cell from 2001 holds very little.
That is where the Nokia 3310 has landed: a display piece with a working keypad, bought for what it stands for rather than what it does. The Motorola Razr V3, the phone that took the status-object job next, ended up in the same drawer for the same reason.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Nokia 3310 still available to buy in 2026?
No Nokia 3310 has been manufactured since 2005, so every original sold in 2026 is second-hand or refurbished. Complete boxed sets were listed at around $200 on Etsy in September 2026, and bare working handsets cost considerably less. HMD Global's 2017 reissue is also no longer current, and its exclusive licence to put the Nokia name on devices expired in March 2026.
How many Nokia 3310 phones were sold?
The Nokia 3310 sold 126 million units between its release in the fourth quarter of 2000 and its discontinuation in 2005, which made it one of the best-selling phones of its era. That figure covers the original model only, not the reissue HMD Global sold under the same name from 2017.
What was the 2017 Nokia 3310 reissue?
HMD Global, the Finnish company that licensed the Nokia phone brand in 2016, announced a new Nokia 3310 at Mobile World Congress on February 26, 2017, at about $52. It kept the name, the shape and Snake but added a color screen and a 2 megapixel camera, and a 3G version arrived in October 2017 because the original release was 2G only.