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Nokia's Banana Phone From The Matrix is Back (theverge.com)

Posted by msmash on from the this-is-bananas dept.

The Verge: Back in 1999, Keanu Reeves was famous for playing Neo in The Matrix, and not for looking sad on a bench. Nokia was also the "world's leading mobile phone supplier" back then, and it used this popularity to feature its Nokia 8110 "banana phone" in The Matrix film. At the time everyone who considered themselves cool (definitely me) wanted a Nokia phone just like Neo's, but most of us had to settle for the Nokia 7110 with its spring-loaded slider. Now HMD, makers of Nokia-branded phones, is bringing the Nokia 8110 back to life as a retro classic . Just like the Nokia 3310 that was a surprise hit at Mobile World Congress last year, the 8110 plays on the same level of nostalgia. The slightly curved handset has a slider that lets you answer and end calls, and HMD is creating traditional black and banana yellow versions. The Nokia 8110 runs on the Smart Feature OS, so this is a basic featurephone and you're not going to get access to the Android apps found on other Nokia Android smartphones. The Nokia 8110 will be available in May for just 79 euros ($97).

13 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. It's the best, beats the rest by scourfish · · Score: 3, Funny

    cellular, modular, interactive-odular

  2. Whoah by SEMLogistics · · Score: 2

    This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

    1. Re: Whoah by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 2

      That's a very interesting theory if they had ever actually made sequels to the matrix. Did you get access to the unproduced scripts?

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
    2. Re:Whoah by Falos · · Score: 3, Insightful

      iirc red pill was for tracking your 3D meat body, perhaps like a radioisotope tracer but with brainwaves, then they can locate your connection/battery pod.

      Blue probably knocks you out, which might prevent the effort of the wake-up hack, not unlike your remote machine going to sleep. Or maybe they can unplug you anyway. It might also be a short-term memory wipe, for whatever grade of hollywood amnesia dust.

      It might be a question of time-until-effect, or effect duration. Or maybe the question wasn't serious to begin with and I wasted keystrokes while waiting for quitting time.

  3. Yeah, not so much by nathana · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is not so much a recreation of the Nokia 8110 that was in the movie as it is an "homage". It's a completely new, designed-from-the-ground-up piece of hardware (AND software) that just happens to bear a resemblance to the original and takes some design cues from it.

    Not only that, but neither the original 8110 nor this new version actually have a button-triggered, spring-loaded release for the keypad cover. That was something designed specifically for the movie, and IIRC the phones in the movie were not even functional: they were props that had been gutted of any real functionality and then fitted with the spring-loaded mechanism which, given the era, was impossible to fit into the phone while leaving the actual phone guts intact.

    There was a Nokia model, the 7110, that actually had a spring-load keypad cover that vaguely resembled what we saw in the movie, though it was not as "exciting".

    -- Nathan

    1. Re:Yeah, not so much by arth1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is not so much a recreation of the Nokia 8110 that was in the movie as it is an "homage". It's a completely new, designed-from-the-ground-up piece of hardware (AND software) that just happens to bear a resemblance to the original and takes some design cues from it.

      Yes, it's quite different in many ways. Obviously the connectivity is different, because most phone companies no longer support GSM 900 with SSMS gateways.
      But they have taken some shortcuts elsewhere too, like the buttons, which are way different from the original, and not in a good way.
      Then there's the lack of a changeable battery with external charger, which was one of the big selling points: you could continue to use the phone while another battery charged.
      And, perhaps the biggest cheap shortcut is that the microphone is not in the slider, where it can be put in front of your mouth, but is on the phone itself. That completely ruins the advantage the 8110 had over all other phones in that you could put the mic in front of your mouth, like with a real phone. Especially for people with full beards (this is slashdot, right?), this makes quite a difference.
      I'd say the slider mic is the defining feature of the 8110, and replacing it with just a sliding lid completely misses the entire point of having the slider in the first place.

    2. Re:Yeah, not so much by Opportunist · · Score: 2

      The 7110 was actually a very decent phone. The spring-loaded cover was a bit gimmicky, but it actually did work surprisingly long (longer than most contemporary phones work altogether...) and it lasted ages on a single charge. Often I forgot where the heck that damn charger was because I didn't need it for weeks sometimes.

      Yeah, impossible to imagine today, a phone that you don't have to charge constantly...

      Thinking about it, the only functionality I'd miss from my current phone compared to what the 7110 was capable of is the navigation system...

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    3. Re:Yeah, not so much by arth1 · · Score: 2

      Seriously? It's just decorative now?

      From what I can tell, it still works as a switch hook to let you answer calls or hang up. But the microphone being extended was kind of the entire point of the phone...

  4. The Matrix was a great movie by Minupla · · Score: 2

    The Matrix was a great movie, too bad they never made any sequels!

    --
    On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
  5. Re:Definitely not for teens by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 2

    Teenagers hate to speak on the phone, they only use texting via various apps (SMS, Messenger, whatever), or facetiming with iFacetime or Messenger.

    My daughter can use 1GB per day of data but 0 minute per month :)

    This Nokia phones are for old farts like me or OP who wanted to be cool in 1999 but had no money for a 8110 :)

    That's got nothing to do with being a teenager. I have teenage children of my own and I can use 0 minutes of talktime a month and 1GB of data a day. (although usually my allocated 5GB lasts me a month). I hate talking on the phone, and most people I know do too.

    --
    "That's the way to do it" - Punch
  6. They misunderstood who the customer was by sjbe · · Score: 2

    Because they weren't the smartphone of today?

    No, because they were recognizably crap by the standards of the day. It was well known that handset makers regarded the carriers (AT&T, Verizon, etc) as their customers rather than the end users. As a result they made very little effort to make their devices especially useful post purchase. This strategy worked until the iPhone dropped and then the handset makers that relied on this distribution bottleneck (Nokia being foremost among them) found themselves in deep shit.

    Did you ever try to get a Nokia phone to talk with a PC circa 2000-2005? I did with multiple devices. It SUCKED. Seriously, Nokia was absolutely terrible at consumer oriented software and interfaces. The "web browser" on my last Nokia phone was only a web browser in the sense that it technically could load a web page. But it was utterly useless for real world use. It simply allowed them to claim the phone had the capability. Same with the email on the phone. Blackberries did email ok at the time but every Nokia I ever held prior to the iPhone (and for a while after) was absolutely horrid at email. Even text messaging was a shit show unless you had a phone with a proper querty keyboard.

    They are of course judged their competition of the time.

    Most of the competition of the time sucked too but it had little to do with their technical capabilities. They simply designed bad devices because they thought their customer was a big corporation instead of the person actually using the device. Some of the devices like the Palm devices and Blackberries were ok for the era. They were actually usable for real work albeit with recognizable deficiencies. Nokia just never really figured smartphones out until way too late in the game to matter.

  7. I'm ashamed, but I have to admit.. by RobertNotBob · · Score: 2

    This makes me want to put a few of theses into shipping envelopes and leave them on some of my coworkers desk. -- The intent being that when they open them, I will see how many of them I can convince to step out of the windows onto the ledge. -- Does this make me a bad person?

    --
    ___ I don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, and I Never Mod them UP.
  8. Re:Nostolgia Epidemic. by Voyager529 · · Score: 2

    As time goes on new technology advances making such trade offs lessen and should be brought back, so you get regain some advantage that had been lost.

    Well yes...but when enough is lost, pining for the 'good old days' goes beyond nostalgia and becomes the hope for a renaissance.

    Nostalgia looks back and forgets lots of DRM systems that were used in the earlier days. One can avoid doing that while also looking for some sort of sensible compromise that reduces casual copying while also not requiring the draconian levels that are present today.

    Nostalgia looks back and exclusively remembers good discussions on Usenet. One can look back and remember the spam and trolling problems while also appreciating its near-perfect hybrid of centralized and decentralized paradigms and the fact that the technological inability to have any sort of filtering or algorithmic capacities at the server level left it up to users to decide what they did or did not want to see, in contrast to Facebook constantly having issues on this front.

    Nostalgia looks back and remembers that dial-up ISPs had far more competition than broadband providers do in most of the country. It's possible to appreciate that while also not-appreciating 28.8k internet speeds.

    We solved plenty of problems, but exchanged them for others. Whether it is a beneficial exchange is an exercise for the reader.