Old Nokia handsets would be the only thing to survive the apocalypse- Flora Bagnall

Old Nokia handsets would be the only thing to survive the apocalypse- Flora Bagnall

So I’ve recently come out of the dark ages and brought myself a smart phone but honestly its rubbish! It runs out of charge all the time, its already chipped, it simply doesn’t compare to my old resilient little Nokia handset. Now when I joined RHS I was hideously embarrassed by my seriously uncool plastic brick when everyone else at the time had new shinny blackberries.  Therefore I tried everything I could to destroy this little lump of mobile rubbish, and I mean everything, from playing baseball with it to running it over with my bike. Yet it endured and survived all that I put it through a true super phone! I wanted to find out exactly how super these little Nokia bricks truly are and so I took it upon myself to put them through some grueling tests to test their superpowers. I have concluded now that the only man-made objects to survive a nuclear war, asteroid collision or zombie apocalypse would be the good old Nokia handsets.

The Nokia phones dating from the early 2000s are ‘pretty much indestructible’, I started by dropping them and sitting on them, and then working up to see just how much they can take. After the phones were dropped in the toilet and flushed and then hit with a hammer, I became curious about just exactly what it would take to break one of these damn things, before escalating to dynamite before finally, a thermonuclear blast in the 20-kiloton range.

The indestructible Nokia 3310
The indestructible Nokia 3310

My experiments results show the blast resulted in some minor scratching to the screen and a tendency to drop signal just when you’re trying to ring the answerphone. I have since been in touch with the department of supernatural Nokia’s at various universities who echoed my findings. This is what they had to say:

“Everyone knows that you just can’t get rid of those old phones,” said chief analyst Simon Williams of the Department of Nokia Studies at Cambridge University.

“They just sit there in the back of your drawer, resisting all attempts to break them so you can justify getting an upgrade.

“Our interest was first really piqued when someone drove over one in a 50-tonne mining truck and then still used it to ring for pizza.

“One particularly tenacious Nokia 3310 handset is still bobbing around in that Icelandic volcano after we threw it in the top following that eruption in 2010 – remote drones indicate that it’s still playing the hold music for the Talk Talk helpline, as they’ve not answered yet.”

These various academics have described my findings as ‘optimistic’, as at least this means should the unthinkable happen survivors in the post-nuclear wasteland will be able to start rebuilding civilization on the back of easy communications. However, they fear that future wars may begin as a result of people taking the piss out of each other’s ‘totally old, clunky brick’ handsets.

2 comments

comments user
Alex B

What you neglected to mention was how effective a self-defence tool these things can be against unsuspecting muggers in dark alleys. I would bet good money that their bones break before the handset does.

    comments user
    Flora

    Appologies for missing that out Alex. My team and I didn’t get the chance to test that Hypothesis out but I am sure that would prove to be the case.