A group of old Nokia phones on a blue background and table
(Image credit: Aalto University / Nokia)
A new official Nokia Design Archive will tell the story of its classic phones
We'll get the history of Nokia's best handsets plus 'unseen prototypes'
The online portal will fully launch on January 15, 2025
For those of us who remember the pre-smartphone era, classic Nokia phones still pack a big emotional punch – and a new online Nokia museum promises to take us all down a nostalgic wormhole into the Finnish company's heyday.
The Nokia Design Archive, which will launch on January 15, 2025, promises to be way more than just a gallery showing some of the best phones of all time. According to the Aalto University, which curates the museum, the online portal will include "never-before-seen material" and "unseen prototypes. "
The Design Archive sounds like just the kind of epic distraction we'll need in January. It'll include over 700 stories about all the weird and wonderful phones Nokia made from the mid-90s to 2017 when Microsoft sold Nokia to HMD Global.
That list will include the Nokia 3310 'brick phone' to the Nokia 8810 'banana phone' from The Matrix. Still, we're actually more intrigued by the "previously unseen ideas, prototypes and processes" promised by the Aalto University.
A sketch showing a prototype Nokia phone
(Image credit: Aalto University / Nokia / Microsoft Mobile)
The years of peak Nokia saw some wild designs (see the Nokia 7280 'lipstick phone'), so we're fascinated to see what sketches and ideas the Finnish company didn't actually bring to life.
As Kaisu Savola, the project's Post doctoral researcher, Dept. of Design, notes:“Nokia was in a similar position in the 90s as Samsung or Apple are today. When we started the project, the focus was on objects. As we began going through the material, we soon realized that it was about people.”
The Nokia Design Archive is shaping up to be a fun and potentially tear-jerking ride – you'll be able to find it on the Aalto University's website from January 15.
Back to the future
In these days of Android and iPhone dominance, it's hard to appreciate now just how dominant Nokia was in the 1990s and early 2000s. The Design Archive will serve as both a nostalgia trip and a reminder of how quickly tech giants can fall.
At first, the online portal will only contain a fraction of the stories, images and prototypes licensed from Microsoft Mobile. The Aalto University says it'll be working through a repository containing over 20,000 items and 959GB worth of born-digital files to tell Nokia's story.
Those files will also include futuristic concepts that Nokia never managed to create – for example, a pair of virtual reality glasses – that give us a glimpse of how the company might have developed if touchscreen smartphones hadn't eclipsed it.
I still remember going to the launch of the Nokia N83 in 2006 and being told to refer to the Symbian Series 60 device as a "multimedia computer" rather than a phone. Nokia had the technology, but it didn't always know how to market it to a mass audience – and the iPhone soon changed the game.
The Nokia Design Archive should, then, be a fascinating look behind the curtain of the Finnish company's inner workings in its glory days before then – and some of its wildest concept ideas, too.
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Mark is TechRadar's Senior news editor. Having worked in tech journalism for a ludicrous 17 years, Mark is now attempting to break the world record for the number of camera bags hoarded by one person. He was previously Cameras Editor at both TechRadar and Trusted Reviews, Acting editor on Stuff.tv, as well as Features editor and Reviews editor on Stuff magazine. As a freelancer, he's contributed to titles including The Sunday Times, FourFourTwo and Arena. And in a former life, he also won The Daily Telegraph's Young Sportswriter of the Year. But that was before he discovered the strange joys of getting up at 4am for a photo shoot in London's Square Mile.