Back in 2003, I was still in college. My brother had recently joined a pharmaceutical company in Hyderabad. His job required him to have a mobile phone. He came home one weekend from Hyderabad with his first cellphone – a Nokia 3310. Until then the only cellphone I had seen was from far away in the hands of a guy-in-bus, a lady-in-car, uncle-in-car etc, but this was close, real close! We didn’t have a landline either then, so this small greenish thing in my brother’s hand was our phone.
It was an amazing thing!! It had a small LCD screen where it proudly displayed Airtel. I expected a cellphone to have just call and end buttons other than the digits but NO it had so many things !! A clock, an alarm, a calender and Games!! The Snake and the Tetris. And the display was always ON, the phone never really had to be switched off!! Too much. The phone never worked in chennai, the days of automatic roaming enabled had not yet come. For a mind not yet used to computers or a simple landline, this was a bit too much. My brother had enabled this keypad auto lock and try as I might I could not unlock it. Even though the LCD displayed showed ‘Press Unlock then *’ I couldn’t decipher the code and unlock the phone, it was too much for me. In a way a disgrace for a Electronics engineering student 
. It had irritating monophonic ringtones, but we loved it. There was SaareJahan se accha, Nokia default tune and few other good ones and few terrible ones like Frog and Hop. Then there was this vibration. It used to be so loud I used to wonder why would someone require a ringtone when this vibration is so loud. For our simple minds it was too much and we looked up my brother in awe that he operates this thing on a day to day basis! Slowly we got used to it and starting loving it and couldn’t part with it. Every visit from my brother was awaited, not for him alone but for his cellphone too.
These days he has a touch screen phone with a latest movie mp3 song as ringtone but it isn’t the same as the monophonic tune from the 3310.
