Why your Nokia phones last forever - an illustrated guide
Sidin Vadukut -
Friday, November 21, 2008 3:01 PM
Eight years ago, when I got my first mobile phone and I had to pay RPG some 16 rupees a minute incoming and several lakhs per minute per SMS, I first draped my fingers around a Nokia 3310. Remember that model? Of course you do. Some of you probably still use it.
If there was one mobile phone you never, EVER, kept using waiting for it to breakdown before a replacement it was the 3310 Nokia. The handset, which I remember being many people's first mobile, was indestructible. You could sit on it, drop it, pour steaming hot Kumbakonam filter coffee all over it (as the author did several times) and it would shrug it all off without as much as a flicker of that pixelated display screen. Once, in a previous life as a phenomenally inept graduate engineer trainess in a manufacturing factory, I may even have welded my phone to the exhaust pipe assembly of a Toyota Qualis.
Nothing happened to it.I just ripped it off the hot steel, marked one "faulty part" in the factory floor register, and swapped covers. And the phone was as good as new. It took a staff picnic to a local water park and a long sojourn at the bottom of a wave pool for the phone to finally give up its soul. I was not particularly sad to see it finally off my hands.
Of course they just don't make phones like the 3310 anymore. New models these days with their GPRS, and megapixels and wi-fi and booming bass reflex speakers come out of the box with already a few parts needing replacement. But those people at Nokia still aren't slouches when it comes to giving them phones a thorough once over. Nokia has released a delightful sequence of images of phones being tested at some top secret facility which is superb eye candy for mobile phone freaks everywhere. Phones get pinched, pulled, rubbed, dropped, rattled, rolled and massaged with moisturizer.
Drip test to check phone resistance to embarassing incidents with Champagne bottles and imported beer cans.
Keypad pressing test to ensure phone is ready for all night Snake marathons after consuming above mentioned imported beer.
Swedish massage for Finnish phone.
Find all the other images and a delightful video of a drop test here.
Meanwhile tell us your favourite example of gadgets that, like Superstar Rajnikanth, simply would'nt die. Sony Trinitron TVs, National Tape Players, Panasonic Two-in-ones, Braun mixies, HMT watches and that little red light you have in the pooja room are all potential candidates.