Nokia Design Archive is a digital museum for classic feature phones

At a time when Android phones and iPhones dominate the smartphone era, it is difficult to remember a time when the Nokia phones were a ground-breaking invention. For those people who have seen the pre-smartphone era, the classic mobile phones made by Nokia will make you feel nostalgic. Now, these old mobile devices will be featured in a virtual museum very soon.

Meet the Nokia Design Archive, a digital museum, that will showcase some of the best feature phones of all time, including some unseen prototypes and never-before-seen material.

The Nokia Design Archive will showcase Nokia’s journey

Curated by Aalto University, The Nokia Design Archive will feature all the wonderful and quirky Nokia mobile phones from the mid-90s to 2017, when Microsoft sold Nokia to HMD Global. It will include designs from the Nokia 3310 brick phone to the banana phone featured in The Matrix, Nokia 8810.

The Nokia Design Archive will showcase Nokia in its glory days. At first, the exhibit will only contain a fraction of the stories, images and prototypes licensed from Microsoft Mobile. According to the Aalto University, this repository will tell Nokia’s story. It contains over 20,000 items and around 959GB worth of born-digital files.

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This will also include the futuristic concepts that Nokia never managed to create. It will also give viewers a peek into how the Finnish company might have developed if touchscreen smartphones weren’t made.

The Nokia Design Archive will launch on January 15, 2025 on the website of Aalto University and will be accessible for free. While viewing these tech gadgets will be a trip down memory lane, it will also be intriguing to see the sketches and ideas that didn’t make it to production.