Call it nostalgia or a desire to return to simpler days, but one French design firm is taking handsets that many of us loved in the 90s and re-releasing them with a fresh coat of paint and a set new batteries. Lëkki, which we’re not even going to pretend we know how to pronounce, began selling the Motorola StarTAC back in October. They haven’t commented on sales, but we know there had to be at least a few people with some extra Euros laying around who picked one up. Today they’ve released their second handset, a classic that many of you will remember, the Nokia 3210. It was the first handset that the Finnish firm made which featured an internal antenna and it even had T9, which at the time, the year 1999, was still considered new and cutting edge. The 3210 went on to sell 160 million units, even though it weighed over 150 grams, was 22 mm thick, and had a battery that barely gave put out 4 hours of talk time.
If you’re in the mood to relive your younger days, give this puppy a go. It’s going to cost you 75 EUR, but we think that’s a bargain since many of the phones that are sold today in that price range are built using questionable materials and typically don’t last longer than a year. The now 11 year old Nokia 3210 will easily last another 11 years if you take care of it.
What other handsets do you want to see Lëkki bring back? We contacted them and requested an interview as we’re curious to know why they’re doing what they’re doing, what they have in the pipeline, and what they think about the super smartphones of today that do everything from browsing the web to showing you where you are on a map with an accuracy of less than 3 meters.
[Via: Gizmodo]