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Nokia 3310 Relaunch, Other Latest Updates From Mobile World Congress 2017

By Christon Jervil Ligon
Published on: 10:11 PST, Feb 26, 2017

After almost a couple of decades of being snuffed out into extinction, the bygone days of the iconic Nokia 3310 is over. The once very popular model, known for its sturdiness, and the snake game of course, has made its heralded comeback at the 2017 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Whether the Nokia 3310 is meant to stay for long or can sustain the hype behind its re-launch and actually translate it into sales, is in question. Some experts are downplaying its potential and claiming that it’s just some marketing ploy to create nostalgia and capitalize from its popularity in the past to turn heads and pique the interest of the market to the Finnish brand and its newly-launched smartphone devices.

Notwithstanding, the previous owners of the Nokia 3310 are just delighted to know that their ever-reliable companion from their younger days has just been resurrected.

“The 3310 was the first mass-market mobile and there’s a massive amount of nostalgia and affection for it,” said Ben Wood of CCS Insight, a technology consultancy firm.

“If HMD had just announced three Android devices they would have barely got a couple of column inches in the press. So, the 3310 is a very clever move and we expect it will sell in significant volumes.”

According to BBC, the Nokia 3310 won’t even qualify as a smartphone, but will only pass for as a feature phone because of its limited internet and mobile capabilities like a 2.5G connectivity, a two-megapixel single camera, and a less powerful S30+ operating system permitting fewer apps than what the Android and iOS devices these days can handle.

Arto Nummela, chief executive for HMD Global, the mobile developer behind the Nokia brand, would like to refer to it as a “digital detox” or a “holiday phone.” For him, people would want to buy the Nokia 3310 more of as a supplemental phone to their smartphone devices that can serve as a fallback in case the battery of their primary device would run low.

The new Nokia 3310 boasts a longer battery life compared to most smartphones of today, with a talk time of close to 24 hours.

And, with a price tag of just $51 (€49), it may not be so much of a hard sell after all. Not, when you are also getting the pre-installed Snake mobile game that comes in its modernized version. And, some might even buy it for that reason alone.

Elsewhere in the Mobile World Congress 2017, other big names in the tech industry like LG, BlackBerry, Sony, and Samsung also have some latest offerings of their own.

While Samsung has decided to put off the launch of its flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S8, to a later event on the last week of March, the company introduced two new tablet devices during the Mobile World Congress — the Galaxy Book 10 and Galaxy Book 12. They are powered by Intel Core m3 processor and Core i5 processor, respectively, and are both running Windows 10, wrote The Verge.

LG, meanwhile, introduced their flagship phone, the LG G6, notes Wired. The 5.7-inch device with a 2,880 x 1,440 resolution FullVision display is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821, 4GB RAM, and a 3,300mAh battery.

Lenovo also launched the Moto G5 and Moto G5 Plus as part of their best-selling G series lineup. Both variants run the new Android 7.0 Nougat, have a premium metal finish, and a Full HD 1080p display — 5-inch LCD display for the G5 and 5.2-inch for the G5 Plus.

The TCL-licensed BlackBerry also released the BlackBerry KeyOne in the Mobile World Congress, which was previously given the codename “Mercury.” The new phone is made of aluminum and comes with a Gorilla Glass 4 cover for its 4.5-inch LCD display, which has a resolution of 1620 x 1080. It also features a 12-megapixel camera equipped with a 1.55-micron-pixelized Sony sensor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ9ccKqpkIA

[Featured Image by Emilio Morenatti/AP Images]

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