Many people would think that a feature phone era is long gone, but HMD Global is playing a trump card by releasing the Nokia 3310 again, after 17 years. And there’s a reason for the company to do that as well. Before the company thought of bringing an old Nokia phone, they have conducted a survey between some of the most successful Nokia phones, and the Nokia 3310 emerged as a winner in the survey.
And rightly so. Because the Nokia 3310 is one of the best Nokia smartphones ever and the company has sold over 127 million units of the iconic device. As said earlier, the device was announced at the MWC 2017, and HMD is slowly shipping the device to every country, and luckily enough, India is one amongst them to reach it ahead of other nations.
I managed to get a unit of the Nokia 3310. Right from opening the device from the retail package, I fell in love with the phone. In fact, not only me, every member of my house started to applaud the cuteness of the phone. The new Nokia 3310 did take design cues from the 2000’s 3310, and the grey and blue coloured units resemble the old-age device. It comes with a 2.4-inch QVGA display with a curved glass on top. The curved glass adds a bezel-less look to the feature phone.
The Nokia logo is present above the display, and it has the oval buttons, same as the old device. The 2.4-inch QVGA screen is decent as well, and surprisingly enough, it offers excellent viewing angles for a feature phone.
Being a feature phone, the device misses out on the touch screen, and you have to rely on the D-pad and the two menu buttons for navigating. For entering the text, you will get 12 numeric keys. Well, it’s been almost seven years since I used a feature phone, and it certainly gave me nostalgia while typing with the numeric keys.
Software side, the device runs on redesigned Symbian S30+ OS, which looks colourful and now has more functions. Then there’s the Snake game- a ‘2017 version Snake’ calls HMD Global. The Snake game is not the one we played on the Nokia 3310 back then. Instead, the company has made it look colourful, but we would love to see the same version of the Snake in the 2017 Nokia 3310.
The loudspeaker is placed on the back side of the phone, which is surprisingly loud. And yes, HMD has added a 2MP rear camera. Don’t expect images to be posted on social media captured with the Nokia 3310.
The device comes with 16MB of internal storage and sadly, there’s only 1.4MB available for end users. However, there’s a dedicated microSD card slot to expand the storage. Coming to the major promising aspect of the device: the battery life. All I can say for now is yet to be tested and may be the Nokia 3310 (2017) will be the one which will consume a longer review period as it’s battery never refuse to die. HMD promises 30 days of standby battery life and one week of juice with normal usage.
The Nokia 3310 (2017) looks absolutely gorgeous in real life, but the major let down with the phone is the lack of 4G connectivity. Yes, the new Nokia 3310 doesn’t even have support for 3G, and you have to rely on the 2G network, which is a long gone technology now.
Will the Nokia 3310 (2017) achieve the success of what the original Nokia 3310 had and mark an impressive comeback to the iconic brand? Yes, I fell it certainly does. The device has got elegant looks and all the necessary options required in a feature phone. However, the lack of 4G connectivity is a bummer. Also, HMD Global has got the pricing right at Rs. 3310 in India as the feature phone market share is at 55 percent in the country. That said, the Nokia 3310 (2017) will be sold in big numbers in the country, but again, HMD has to take care of the availability issues.
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