It is mid-2005, and while the rest of the world is obsessing over megapixels and 3G video calls that nobody actually wants to make, Nokia has released the 1110—a phone that looks like it was designed for a minimalist cult or a very stylish toddler. This is the entry-level king, the ‘phone for people who hate phones,’ and it has arrived in the UK to prove that monochrome isn’t dead; it’s just gone into reverse. For about £40 on a Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go deal, you’re getting a device that is essentially a high-tech bar of soap that can survive being dropped down a flight of stairs and then used to call for help.nnThe headline technical quirk here is the ‘inverted’ monochrome display. Instead of black text on a green or grey background, you get yellow text on a black background (96 x 68 pixels). It’s surprisingly readable in direct sunlight and makes the phone look like a prop from an early 1980s sci-fi film. There are no fancy TFTs here to drain your battery; just pure, high-contrast utility. The keypad is a single sheet of ‘dust-proof’ silicone, which feels a bit like pressing on a firm marshmallow, but it ensures that no amount of grit from a building site or lint from a pocket is ever going to stop you from sending a text.nnTechnically, the 1110 is as basic as a boiled potato, but it does its one job brilliantly. It features ‘speaking’ alarms and clocks, which is a great novelty for about three minutes, and a built-in torch that is arguably the most useful feature in mobile history. There’s no GPRS, no WAP, and definitely no camera. What you do get is the BL-5C battery—the legendary 900 mAh cell that powers half of Nokia’s lineup—which gives this phone a staggering 380 hours of standby time. You could leave this in a drawer, go on a fortnight’s holiday to Tenerife, and come back to find it still has three bars of signal. It’s the ultimate ’emergency’ phone, a masterpiece of low-cost engineering that reminds us that at the end of the day, a phone is meant for talking, not for taking grainy photos of your lunch.