A revamped version of the 3310, known for its simple design and a near indestructible shell, was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday.
The existence of the simple feature phone had been leaked earlier this month. The new 3310 has been brought to the market by HMD Global Oy, a Finnish company which bought the rights to the Nokia brand last year.
“This is what consumers have been asking us for, and so we decided that we’d just do it and have some fun with it, said Florian Seiche, president of HMD. “That’s the unique opportunity we have here at HMD with the Nokia brand.”
Nokia has sold 126 million of its original 3310 phone since it was first introduced back in September, 2000. It was a time before the iPhone, and Nokia ruled with popular handsets that let you play simple games like Snake. Now the 3310 is making a nostalgic return in the form of a more modern variant, thanks to Nokia-branded phone maker HMD. Like its predecessor, it will still be called the Nokia 3310, but this time it’s running Nokia’s Series 30+ software, with a 2.4-inch QVGA display, a 2-megapixel camera, and even a microSD slot.
HMD promises that the new Nokia 3310 will be as durable as the old one, often seen as practically indestructible by the teens of the 2000s. The new 3310 is about half the thickness of the original and has 10 times the talk time, with 22 hours, and twice the standby time: one month – a duration almost unheard-of in 2017.
The phone will cost about €50 (£42) when released in the second quarter of 2017. The original cost in 2000 was £129.99 on pay as you go.
For its part, the 3310 isn’t the only phone HMD is unveiling at MWC this year. Three Android-based smartphones, the competitively priced, mid-tier devices the Nokia 6, 5 and 3 – there is no Nokia 4 now nor has there ever been as the number is considered unlucky in China – each with aluminium unibody designs, a bloat-free Pixel-like Android experience and guaranteed updates for two years from release.
HMD hopes to achieve its aim of democratising smartphones and bringing high-end features and quality to mid-tier prices. Chinese rivals such as Huawei are already saturating the market at scale with quality devices.
For CCS Insight’s Ben Wood, as nice as HMD’s new Nokia Android phones are, it’s all about the brand. He said: “If someone walks into a shop and they want a mid-tier phone, do they buy a Huawei, or a OnePlus, a Xiaomi or a Vivo or Wileyfox or something else they’ve never heard of, or a do they buy the Nokia, the brand they know?”.