Indestructible, and the benchmark for every phone since.
Snake II, composer ringtones, and a reputation for surviving anything, which was mostly deserved.
The composer let you type in ringtones note by note, and there were magazines that printed the note sequences for chart songs.
It is the most memed phone in history and Nokia relaunched it in 2017 on the strength of the nostalgia alone.
Cost back then
£129
Goes for now
£30–£90 for originals
Keep going
Point and shoot digital cameras that ate batteries, filled a card in an afternoon, and were still a revelation.
ADSL arrived with a microfilter on every phone socket and changed the household relationship with the internet permanently.
Apple's music player, and the click wheel that made scrolling through 5,000 songs genuinely pleasant.
Predictive text turned nine keys into a keyboard and created an entire dialect of abbreviations.