I recently got my hands on an old mobile phone, a Nokia 3410 from 2002. By coincidence, I have been following polyducks’ Nokia art jam events, and they all revolve around that specific model. So, naturally, when I stumbled upon this phone, I had to take it with me!

(I also took part in last year’s event, but I missed this year’s deadline – it would have been cool to show off an entry on real hardware.)

Notably, the 3410 was one of the first consumer phones with support for third-party apps (in the form of Java mobile apps a. k. a. J2ME). It even has OpenGL-like 3D support, as showcased by the built-in screen savers:

I’m not sure how the 96×65 pixel display fared in 2002 – was that considered “hi-res” or “okay”? My 1999 Siemens SL10 already had four colors with 97×54 pixels. Then again, that definitely wasn’t a consumer-class phone…

Since I’ve dabbled in J2ME development professionally back in the days, I would love to put something new on that screen (and on the beeper). I’m not sure what’s the easiest way to achieve this – forage a Nokia data cable and dig out some ancient Nokia phone suite software? Get an extra SIM card and hope I can download something that way? (At least in Germany, GSM/2G hasn’t been turned off yet.) I just hope I don’t have to flash the firmware or something.

Getting this phone to work was fun already:

• Buy a new Nokia power adapter, because it’s just the law that your giant box of cables contains everything but the adapter you need.
• Find a spare SIM card – without it, the phone won’t let you do anything.
• Get trolled. :)

The SIM card was easy. I found a deactivated one in an old iPhone 5, and the fact that it was cut down to a nano-SIM while the phone expects a standard-format SIM provided a great opportunity to do some hardware MacGyvering:

I even remembered the PIN code! But after the phone accepted the code, I got this message:

“Device defective” – damn, I thought this phone should work with any SIM card inserted, even if it’s deactivated? Turns out it does, and this was just a little joke by the previous owner. The previous owner, who happens to be my SO, had even told me about it in the past!

But as I was already expecting an error message at this point, I didn’t even think of it: “Gerät defekt” was set up as the phone’s welcome message twenty years ago! Heh, nice one… :)