The Nokia 3310 was a mid range phone that came out in the year 2000 with a (monochrome) black and green screen
it had not much extra’s you could send SMS (short message service) messages with is and make and take calls. That was all it had have there where later models like the 3330 and the 3410 who supported WAP (minimalist internet solution back then), or animated screensavers.
Now lets get to why the 3310 design was so strong.
The Nokia 3310 was build with a double shell an inner shell that holds everything and an outer shell that just is for design purposes.
And that double design made it so strong because the outer shell was from a harder plastic than the inner shell and it took all the impacts from falls and other things that could happen to the phone, See the pictures below.
The first thing that holds our phones back now is our desire for slim and light phones like the iphones samsungs and the technology we are using today.
Here are some points why phones can not be so tough.
The phones now are just almost as slim as the gap that Nokia used between the inner and outer shell.
The screen of the Nokia 3310 and the outer shell has a 1mm gap so you almost never could crack the real LCD screen beneath the protective plastic shell, See the picture below.
Now we use touchscreens so there is barely a gap between the touch panel and the LCD screen
In most phones they are glued together so if the outer glass shatters the inner LCD screen needs to be replaced also.
The outer shells of the 3310 where such a great and cheap design for that time that replacement shells where under 10 bucks.
Try to find a shell (housing) now for a phone for such a cheap price.
So in short the reason there can not be a just as strong and effective phone design now.
Is our expectations from phones today!
PS
Not a Native English speaker so there could be typos or other things that does not sounds logically.
Pictures are taken with a Nokia 808 by myself.