It is late 2003, and while the tech-elite are preening over their colour screens and camera lenses that take photos of what appear to be smudged ghosts, Nokia has quietly released the 1100. If you walked into a Carphone Warehouse today, you might overlook it in favour of the shiny Samsung flips, but make no mistake: this is the most important phone on the planet. Designed at Nokia Design Center in California, the 1100 is aimed at the ‘developing market,’ but in the UK, it has instantly become the king of the building site, the festival field, and the emergency glovebox. It is a phone that doesn’t care about your ‘experience’; it cares about your signal.nnTechnically, the 1100 is a masterclass in ‘less is more.’ It features a 96 x 65 pixel monochrome display that is so clear you could read it during a solar eclipse. The real technical marvel, however, is the ‘monoblock’ design. The keypad and the front are a single, continuous piece of silicone, meaning that if you spill a pint of lager on it or drop it into a bag of cement, you just wipe it off and carry on. There are no gaps for dust or moisture to get in and ruin the circuitry. And then there is the torch. It’s a single LED at the top of the phone, activated by a single long-press of the ‘C’ button. It’s so simple, so brilliantly obvious, that you wonder why every phone doesn’t have one. It’s not a camera flash; it’s a tool for finding your keys in the dark after a long night at the pub, and it is glorious.nnUnder the hood, it’s a dual-band GSM 900/1800 worker. It doesn’t have GPRS, it doesn’t have WAP, and it certainly doesn’t have Bluetooth. What it does have is an internal phonebook for 50 entries and the ability to store 25 SMS messages. But the battery life is where the 1100 enters the realm of legend. The BL-5C Li-Ion battery (850 mAh) provides a standby time of 400 hours. You can go on a two-week holiday, forget your charger, and still have enough juice to call a taxi when you land back at Gatwick. It also features Snake II and Space Impact+, ensuring that your boredom is handled with the same no-nonsense efficiency as your calls. It’s not a fashion statement, and it won’t impress a date, but if the world ends tomorrow, the only things left will be cockroaches and people calling each other on Nokia 1100s.