Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Why I Might Ditch My Smartphone for the Nokia 3310

Retro tech sounds like a good cure for smartphone addiction.

Feature not a bug: This phone is terrible at social media.

Photographer: Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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The comeback of the Nokia 3310, the icon of the "dumb phone" industry, is mainly a marketing gimmick by a Finnish startup. But there's plenty of reasons to embrace it as something more -- as an antidote to these digitally toxic times.

Unlike the original, which was discontinued more than a decade ago, the rebooted model by HMD offers an internet browser and a color screen, though it's not easy to surf the web on a 2.4-inch screen. But it's not really a play for the dumb phone niche that still exists in emerging markets such as India and African nations at $52, enough to buy a cheap smartphone in almost any market.1488207067151 The average manufacturer price of a dumb phone sold in the third quarter of 2016, the last one for which data are available, was $19.