I grew up in a small town in China and pretty much skipped the entire Symbian S60 era. Went straight from basic feature phones to clunky resistive touchscreen phones, then Android. Those keypad-based S60 phones? I'd heard about them, but never actually held one.

So recently I picked up a used Nokia 5320 for 50 yuan (about $7). Not to use as my main phone — just to finally experience what I missed back then. Honestly, it's been a fun little time machine.

What I played on it:

· Symbian games (.sis/.sisx) – The real S60V3 games. A bit of a hassle to install, but they run the most smoothly. · Java games (.jar) – The universal format back in the day. Lots of small games — this is where the nostalgia hits hardest. · MRP games – A weird format from a Chinese platform called "Maopao Community." Mostly ran on knockoff phones. You can run an emulator for it on Symbian too. Kind of an obscure deep cut.

A few tips if you want to try this:

· Get a vertical keypad model like the 5320 or N78. Avoid the resistive touchscreen S60V5 phones — the experience is weird, and not in a fun way. · Max memory card size is 8GB, and those are hard to find now. Try to buy a phone that already comes with a card. · Chargers are much cheaper on Taobao. Search "诺基亚小孔充电器" (Nokia small-hole charger) — about 3–10 yuan ($0.50–$1.50) . If you're outside China, you'll need a proxy buyer or a friend to help ship it. Takes 2–4 weeks, but the price is hard to beat. · If you don't want to deal with real hardware, check out J2ME Loader (for Java), MRP emulator, or EKA2L1 (for Symbian). EKA2L1 takes some setup (you need ROM files), but it works.

The actual experience

By today's standards, this phone is not "good." The interface is clunky, no swipe gestures, and the later resistive screens feel terrible to use. But the 5320 is a music phone — it has physical music buttons on the side. Put on some earphones, press a real button to skip a track... that simple tactile feedback feels more solid than any full-screen gesture.

It's not a practical phone. It's just a $7 device that lets me physically touch a piece of gaming history I completely missed.

What was your first smartphone, and what games did you play on it?