The Nokia 1100 Club. You Got The Balls?

I’ve been really craving a new gadget the last couple of days and I think I found one in a challenge. Not surprisingly, if you know me, the new gadget is a cell phone but what is surpising is the model I’m going with. It’s not the iPhone 3G, the Blackberry Bold or even the HTC Touch Pro. I’m going to accept the Nokia 1100 Club challenge and spend the next 30 days rocking a Nokia 2610. No camera, no email, no calendar and no bullshit. It makes and receives calls and makes and receives text messages, period.

To back up just slightly the Nokia 1100 Club is a challenge that has been laid down in the Nokia forums and is pretty simple. Can you ditch your high end smartphone and go back to the basics for 30 days? The challenge is named after the Nokia 1100 (pictured to the right) a phone that Nokia has sold over 200 million of worldwide. That’s almost more than all of the smartphones sold combined.

Am I a little crazy for trying this? Probably. Is this a crazy Friday whim that is going to allow me to get out of the office and head to the T-Mobile store? Definitely. But I’ve had some kind of email checking smartphone for the last 4 years and I’ve definitely spent some time in the last couple months thinking about giving them up. It’s an expensive habit (my lady friend can attest to that) and frankly I never use half the features that I claim are the reasons for buying the latest and greatest model when I justify it to myself.

So sometime before lunch today I am going to fire up my new Nokia 2610 and my Blackberry Curve that has served me faithfully for the last year (a record for me) is going to start collecting dust in a drawer. Who knows, maybe I will climb down out of my ivory-low-tech-tower 30 days from now and be the first in line to buy the HTC Dream or maybe I will find that low tech is the way to go. Either way it will be fun and it will definitely be a challenge.

Anyone interested in joining me?

Original Story: Nokia via Engadget