5 most memorable things we did with our Nokias

MANILA, Philippines – Before selfies, custom wallpapers, and emojis, there were other ways cellphone users expressed themselves on their mobile phones.  

Before Microsoft’s impending take over of Nokia on Friday, April 25, here’s a throwback to the 5 most memorable things we did with our Nokia phones. 

Texting  

With the world of mobile messaging dominated by apps like WhatsApp and LINE, very soon a new generation of smartphone users won’t even know about texting.

Back in the day, it was an art form. Nokia’s physical keypads were so amazingly tactile, nice and crunchy, and requiring a little more pressure – the feeling is unmatched. Users, even if they didn’t have full keyboards at their disposal, had mastered the art of texting using a series of key presses to reach the desired letter. If you were really good at it, you could text fast and accurate even with your eyes closed.

Changing the Nokia Logo 

Before colored screens, the standard Nokia display had signal bars on the left, battery levels on the right, and right in the middle of the display the Nokia logo or, in some cases, the operator logo or name.

Users could however change their operator logos with custom ones – the ultimate way to customize your home screen, so to speak. If you were any good at pixel art, you could download the Operator Logo Maker and create one for yourself or you could head over to a computer center like Greenhills and have a technician install one for you.

Like tattoo shops technicians had clear books filled with designs to choose from. In the Philippines, telcos also offered custom operator logos at P2.50 a pop. 

Pimping your phone 

When you said cellphone case back in the day, it didn’t refer to the plastic or leather bumpers we use to protect our smartphones today (Nokia phones didn’t need protecting they were indestructible). Instead it referred to casing, the actual cellphone shell.

Many cellphones starting with the Nokia 5110 gave users the option to pop off either the front or back shells of their phones or both. Original phone casings from Nokia were very expensive, but an industry had grown out of the need to personalize and you could get them anywhere with almost any color or design you wanted. Users wanting to trick out their phones even further could also replace their keypad (a sheet of crunchy plastic that went in between the casing and the cellphone body itself) to another color, or even the backlight from the usual greenish/yellow to a more hip bluish/white.

Custom ringtones 

While we loved the Nokia ringtone and its many iterations through the years, nothing spelled customization better than a custom ringtone you yourself created. Beginning with the Nokia 3210 and 3310, users could create ringtones using a composer tool on the phone itself. Almost as if you were texting, you would have to enter numerical values that represented specific notes. The musically challenged wouldn’t have to worry either, as there were websites that carried musical sheets that looked like guitar tabs. 

Snake 

Candy Crush and Flappy Bird are just two of the hundreds of thousands of games that users are playing on their smartphones today. Back in the late ’90s and early 2000s cellphone users played only one game…Snake. In lieu of fancy graphics, gamers had to use their imagination. The snake was merely a series of square pixel blocks. The mechanics are simple – use your keypad to navigate a moving snake around the screen picking up single blocks along the way. The more blocks you pick up, the longer your snake gets, and the harder it is to navigate. To make things even more difficult the snake slithers faster as the game progresses. Snake was a guilty pleasure, a time sink for Nokia users everywhere. Give the game a try…we’ve embedded a version of the game right above this paragraph. 

What are your favorite Nokia memories? Share them with us on Twitter using the hashtag #NokiaThrowback. – Rappler.com