The Nokia 3310 is easy to turn into a meme. Indestructible. Snake. Swapable covers. All of that is true, and none of it is why so many people still type “3310” into a search box at 1 a.m.
It was a working phone. You could hear the other person. The battery lasted. The keypad taught a generation to write without looking. In Europe and much of Asia it was not a collector piece. It was the phone your parents bought because it would not become junk in six months.
On a personal timeline it often sits next to something flashier. A 3310 for calls, then a colour-screen phone for photos that looked like stamps. Or the other way around: you started with a 3210, then the 3310 felt like an upgrade because the interface finally made sense.
If you are building a map of phones before the first iPhone, do not skip the boring Nokia. The famous ones are already in every article. The 3310 is famous and still under-counted as a life object. Put the year you actually got it, not the year it launched. Plenty of 3310s were still new in shops long after 2000.
Then add whatever came after. The jump from a 3310 to a camera phone is a station change. That is the whole idea of the line.