BGR recalls Nokiaβs seemingly indestructible older phones and says it would love to see some unique models return.
BGR says Nokia is known today for its seemingly indestructible phones of old. It would also love to see some of the brandβs unique models make a comeback.
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A BGR wishlist makes the case for reviving four of Nokia's most distinctive handsets: the 9290 Communicator, 3650, N-Gage and N95-3. This is a design exercise, not a product roadmap. Nokia has not announced that any of the phones are returning.
The selections come from an era when mobile hardware took visibly different approaches to typing, gaming and media controls. BGR's proposals keep those physical ideas but imagine them with current software, cameras and components.
Released in the United States in 2002, the 9290 Communicator looked like a conventional candy-bar phone when closed. Open it sideways and it became a miniature laptop, with a second display and a physical keyboard.
BGR says the $600 unlocked handset was a US adaptation of the Nokia 9210 sold in Europe. Its price and lack of carrier subsidies kept it niche in the United States, but the basic idea now feels familiar: a device that changes form when the user needs more screen space or a better input method.
A modern version could keep the outwardly simple phone and the fold-out keyboard while replacing the old Symbian-era hardware with contemporary internals. It would be a different answer to the same problem addressed by today's foldables, prioritizing typing and practical controls over an uninterrupted sheet of glass.
The 3650 is remembered for a keypad arranged in a circle, a visual reference to rotary telephones. It was unmistakable, though BGR describes it as uncomfortable for text entry. Nokia later replaced the layout with a conventional 3-by-4 keypad on related models.
That awkwardness is part of why the phone remains interesting. It shows a manufacturer treating the keypad itself as a design surface, even when the experiment did not improve usability.
BGR imagines revisiting the circle as a tactile click wheel rather than reproducing the original keys exactly. That would preserve the phone's playful identity while giving the control a clearer job, such as scrolling through feeds or selecting contacts.
The N-Gage combined a handheld game system with GSM phone service in 2003. BGR says it cost $300 unlocked, launched with a small game library and required a cellular plan at a time when many potential players were too young to have one.
Its physical design created a more memorable problem. The earpiece and microphone were positioned along the thin top edge, forcing users to hold the device sideways against their face for calls. The resulting βsidetalkingβ pose became a running joke.
Dedicated gaming phones and Android handhelds are much less unusual now. BGR's revival pitch is therefore less about proving that mobile gaming exists and more about fixing the original execution: place the audio hardware sensibly, secure stronger publisher support and retain physical controls.
The N95-3 was the US version of Nokia's N95. Its two-way slider exposed separate hardware controls in either direction, packing different interfaces into a single compact body. BGR says the US model increased the RAM and battery size but still struggled to find a large American audience.
A contemporary take could use one sliding direction for media shortcuts and the other for a physical keyboard. The mechanism would add thickness and moving parts, but it would also give the phone functions that cannot be replicated as convincingly by a flat touchscreen.
The point of BGR's list is not that every old design worked. The 3650's keypad was difficult, the N-Gage's phone ergonomics were infamous, and the 9290 and N95-3 remained specialized devices. Their appeal is that each tried to make hardware suit a particular kind of use. Bringing that spirit back would matter more than reproducing every old flaw.
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