Picture this. It’s the year 1999. The world wide web is still new and exciting. Smartphones and similar inventions are a distant dream. The most futuristic thing anyone can imagine is Keanu Reeves going inside a computer so he can kick a whole bunch of people in the face. What’s the one product you want? That’s right folks. It’s that slick-ass Matrix banana phone with the cool sliding panel over the keypad.
Well, you don’t need to picture it any longer. After Nokia sold off their handset branding to manufacturer HMD, there have been a slew of reboots of ‘classic’ Nokia phones, and the 8110 is the next cab off the rank.
And yes: in comparison to your current smartphone, it is a pile of shit. No bones about it, pal. It’s a feature phone with an insanely underpowered processor running an operating system called KaiOS. You’ll be able to get some Google services on it and maybe Facebook, but there’s not much else going on here apart from texts and calls.
It also has a two megapixel camera for taking pointlessly blurry photos of your mates, who probably look better blurred anyway to be honest. If I don’t tell you, who will?
But! The slider! Imagine how cool you’d look sliding open your Nokia 8110 on the train to accept a call from your Mum while pretending its actually a call from Morpheus.
Oh, and though you might have distant memories of the slider on this one being spring-loaded for maximum slickness… that is not the case. A later model, the 7110, had a spring-loaded slider. Sorry folks.
When can you get your paws on a Nokia 8110? Who knows. At the moment, the website only lists launch models for Europe and the Middle East. Will Australia ever get this classic in eye-catching banana yellow? Time will tell, time will tell.
