IDG Contributor Network: Sorry Nokia, the ‘nostalgia tech’ market died out long ago

I bought my first Nokia phone in the 90s, back when they all looked the same and the only game available was called Snake. You kept animated lines from colliding. It was incrementally more entertaining than watching your eyebrows grow.

I left the phone on a bus once in San Francisco and went into a big panic, not because I liked the phone that much, but it belonged to my employer at the time. How do you explain that one? The grayscale screen was not what you would call high-tech. It was more like a pager with a bigger keypad.

Later in my corporate career, we all “upgraded” to BlackBerry phones...still with a grayscale screen, barely any games, and what was really a micro version of a computer keyboard. These archaic phones had archaic apps that didn’t quite work correctly and crashed often. This was also long before social networking came into existence. If you lost the phone number and contact for someone, there wasn’t much you could do. Go visit them at work? Maybe this existed back then, but I don’t remember being able to easily drop over to a Facebook profile and grab a cell number. And, people didn’t include their cell number in an email signature line. Why bother? Not everyone had a phone, and those who did have one relied mostly on their desk or home phone.

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