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?
You must log in or # to comment.
I’m enjoying your posts, it’s really neat to see retro game tech from China; I really didn’t know what was available there since western journalists don’t really cover it.
I remember playing shareware Doom (not enough storage for the full wad) on the nub of the 7650. Later I got the N70, then N73 and (I think) E65. Loads of pirated S60 and Java games on those bad boys. With a bit of tinkering you could even get N-Gage games running to play Tony Hawk 1. Good times.
If anyone is interested I have the full projects, art, code, everything, for some 30+ games from that time. Racing, puzzle-bubble clone, shmups, platformer, pinball, rpgs, even a “sexy qix game 😁” … All made for the S60 (then modified to run on around 300 different mobiles, but the S60 was our “gold” version).
If anyone knows what to do with it all…
push to public git repo or archive.org, if you have the rights to the games/assets/etc.
Even if the games are ages old mobile nonsense, they’re always someone’s nostalgia bombs
I had a Symbian Nokia as my first smart-ish phone, having a web browser that could run real websites (even if you had to move the cursor around with a dpad) was absolute sci-fi. It could also run flash games, I remember getting a .swf file of pacman from a games website, copying it to my phone, and being able to run it right from the file browser.
"MRP (.mrp) – Here’s a weird one. MRP was a third-party app platform from a Chinese company called ‘Maopao Community’ (literally ‘Bubbling Community’). It was designed to run on the cheap, unofficial ‘clone’ phones (MediaTek chips) that flooded the Chinese market in the late 2000s. Today, you can run an MRP emulator on Symbian too. The games are mostly rough clones and strange RPGs you’ve never heard of, but it’s a fascinating glimpse into a parallel mobile ecosystem that developed completely outside the West. A true deep-cut curiosity
I pretty much enjoyed that vid from Asianometry: https://youtu.be/kgT6pTW8w44 It’s about mobile industry and past trends in China. Maybe that’d lead you to another topic in your posts.
