I've been half paying attention to Mobile World Congress coverage all week (I say "half" because most of it is enterprise networking stuff that means nothing to me), but one announcement from last Sunday actually made me sit up: HMD Global, the outfit that owns the rights to make Nokia-branded phones now, brought back the 8110. Yes, that 8110. The curved yellow slider from 1996 that Neo used to dodge agents in The Matrix. They're calling it the Nokia 8110 4G, it's bright banana yellow (there's a boring black option too but who would pick that), and it costs 79 euros before whatever your carrier decides to tack on.
It's not a smartphone. That's the whole point. It runs something called KaiOS, a lightweight thing forked years back from the bones of Firefox OS, and it can apparently do just enough to be useful: 4G, VoLTE calling, a WiFi hotspot function, even a stripped-down Google Maps. But the headline feature, as far as I'm concerned, is that it ships with Snake. Not "a game like Snake." Snake. The actual reason half of us wasted entire study halls back in the early 2000s.
I don't know why this got to me the way it did. I spent a solid twenty minutes on Monday reading spec sheets for a phone I will almost certainly never buy. Part of it is nostalgia, sure, I had a 3310 in secondary school, not the 8110, but close enough in spirit. Part of it is that I've gotten genuinely tired of the current smartphone landscape. Every flagship coming out this spring is a black glass slab that's marginally thinner or has a marginally better camera than last year's black glass slab. Nobody's doing shapes anymore. Nobody's doing colors that aren't "midnight" this or "space" that. A banana-yellow phone with a satisfying mechanical slide has more personality than I've seen in a gadget in about three years.
Battery life is the other thing that got me. HMD is claiming something like 25 days of standby on a single charge, and even if the real-world number is half that, it's still an order of magnitude better than anything with a Snapdragon chip in it. I go camping maybe twice a year and every single time I end up borrowing someone's battery pack by day two because my actual phone can't make it. A phone that just sits in a bag and works when you need it, for weeks, sounds almost radical at this point.
Would I actually switch to one full time? No. Obviously not. I need maps that don't look like a fax from 2003, I need to reply to emails when I'm out, and I've gotten too dependent on being able to Google something mid-argument to prove a point. But I've started thinking there might be room for a second phone, a dumb one, for weekends when I don't want to be reachable and don't want the temptation of infinite scroll sitting in my pocket. People used to do the flip-phone-for-a-week thing as a kind of digital detox move and I always rolled my eyes at it a little. Now I'm not so sure I was right to.
HMD also used the same event to show off a cheap Android Go phone (the Nokia 1, something like 85 dollars) and a refreshed Nokia 6, but neither got written up nearly as much, and honestly neither interests me nearly as much either. Budget Android phones all blur together after a while. The banana phone is the one people are actually going to remember from this show, because it doesn't look like anything else on a shelf right now.
No release date beyond "coming months," so don't go looking for one at your carrier store this week. But I'm keeping an eye on it. If it shows up somewhere I can actually buy an unlocked one, there's a decent chance I end up with a second yellow phone sitting on my desk purely so I can play Snake during conference calls.