Nokia is bringing back the Matrix phone
When you have a history as long as Nokia, there's a lot of cool stuff too revive -- and HMD Global, the current owner of the Nokia brand, is playing its cards right.
At a press conference in Barcelona on Sunday, the company announced the Nokia 8110 4G -- a rehash of the Nokia 8110, also known as the Matrix phone.
For our very young readers, or people who haven't seen The Matrix (it's possible that they exist) who might not remember why this is important, we'll refer you to this video.
The phone used by the very young Keanu Reeves in the original Matrix movie is the Nokia 8110, a slide-out phone which, at the time (it was released in 1996, though The Matrix features it in 1999) was a high-end device with such cool features as a monochrome graphic LCD and a price tag of more than $1,000. Most of all, the slide out mechanism was just plain cool, and pretty much everyone wanted to own this phone.
The new version of the device, which Nokia says was "inspired" by the original, is a dumbphone, just like the rehashed Nokia 3310 which was launched at last year at MWC. It's got a 2.4-inch QVGA curved display, 4G connectivity, a low-end Qualcomm 205 chip, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage (and a microSD card slot), a 2-megapixel rear camera and a 1,500mAh battery.
Simply put, it's got none of the features that your current phone has -- but it does have a few things going for it -- a 25-day battery, Nokia's famous Snake game, and that superb feeling of being better than your peers when you answer a phone call by sliding the keyboard cover out. And unlike the Nokia 3310, it can actually tether a 4G connection to your laptop.
The Nokia 8110 4G come in black and yellow, but you know which one you want. It'll set you back 79 euros ($97) when it becomes available in May.
Nokia also announced some other phones at the event but that doesn't matter, because the only phone that matters right now is the Matrix phone.
UPDATE: Feb. 25, 2018, 11:05 p.m. CET The post was updated with additional details about the Nokia 8110 4G.
Topics Mobile World Congress
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
