I’m about to change the battery on my iPhone 12 Pro Max, which is my daily driver, which I love. It’s still fast, it’s reliable, does a great job at taking photographs and videos, so I definitely don’t wast to replace it with an idiotic Apple Retardnence iPhone 16 or something, because I now despise the thought of giving apple a ton of freedom buckaroos for a device that does pretty much the same things that my current phone already has.

So I was thinking to try to daily drive an old Nokia, with using a smartphone only as a backup. I am also trying to choose an old laptop to use as a main, except for work. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and talk about the phones.

The contenders

I have a lot of old phones, especially iPhones, as the original iPhone was my initial thought for the project, but unfortunately, it’s not very useful as a retro smartphone, as it can’t connect to the 3G networks, as they were shut down, so I decided to go a bit older and try a Nokia phone comparison.

	Nokia 6210	Nokia 3310	Nokia 8310	Nokia 7650	Nokia 6600
Year	2000	2000	2001	2001	2003
Link	Nokia 6210	Nokia 3310	Nokia 8310	Nokia 7650	Nokia 6600
Memory	some	some	some	4MB internal storage no Card	6MB internal 32MB MMC Card
Camera	none	none	none	640x480	640x480
Pros	fancy business phone long battery life IrDA	UNDESTRUCTABLE has snake long battery life	very smol & fancy long battery life IrDA	camera bluetooth & IrDA BOUNCE!	camera bluetooth & IrDA more memory
Cons	line of dead pixels :( no camera	bit heavy no camera	no camera very smol buttons	very smol memory screen is not too bright chonky	smol memory chonky

All of these are iconic and would be a great contender for the title. My favourite of them all would be the Nokia 7650, as is was the first cameraphone I ever tested, borrowed for a couple of weeks from my cousin, back when it was cutting edge, in highschool, but my main unit unfortunately has some sticky keys that work only half of the time. The older ones would be cool too, as they are small, but they would require me to carry an extra device for taking pictures, which I really like to do. On the other hand, the 6210 is super cool and would make for a beautiful carry-around.

I will also need a couple of weeks, because regardless of the phone I’m going to use, I’m going to need a new battery, as most of the ones I have are over 20 years old and they either don’t hold a charge anymore or started to bloat, which makes them dangerous. An excellent source for these (albeit a bit expensive, but reliable) is PolarCell in Germany.

Which one would you choose? Would you choose something else? Drop a comment, send me some inspiration!