QUAINTNESS OF THE RECENT PAST No. 7

Never mind the general nastiness of Mary Harron's film of American Psycho, based on the book by Bret Easton Ellis. Looked back on, the really, er, striking thing the main character is wielding in the film is not the murderous weaponry but the cell phone. When I posted this yesterday I mistakenly wrote that this was what rich people had as new mobile tech in 2000: but the film was set in the 1980s, so the large plastic housebrick Christian Bale is holding to his ear is in fact quaintness from the 80s:

whereas in 2000 the groovy thing to have was the Nokia 9210 Communicator:

though most people were excited enough at the prospect of acquiring something like this Nokia 3310:

for which the press release from that September is now rather more quaint than the phone (which is pretty much the one I still use). The blurb began like this:

Nokia has today announced a new mobile phone, the Nokia 3310, with a unique chat function, allowing users to chat with text messages on their phones while on the move. With this innovation, Internet chat groups will no longer be confined to the desktop. The Nokia 3310 has been designed particularly for young people and the young at heart, for whom the mobile phone is an important lifestyle accessory and who are already extensively using various messaging services.