Nokia 3310 Relaunches 17 Years After Original Release

The legendary Nokia 3310 brick is back, and don’t panic, it still has Snake.

The new and updated version of Nokia’s iconic handset, which was famous for being as indestructible as it was useful, was re-unveiled at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona on Sunday.

More than 126 million were produced by Nokia before the handset was phased out in 2005.

Revamped Nokia 3310 unveiled at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.

The revamped version itself will be sold as a Nokia device but will not actually be made by Nokia. Instead it is to be manufactured and sold under licence by Finnish start-up HMD Global, which was founded by several ex Nokia Directors and managers after Microsoft ended its brief dalliance into the smartphone market.

The new debut of the old smartphone has been seen by some as a clever move to help HMD market their new Nokia branded Android smartphones. So far, the marketing push seems to have worked, and the 3310 seems to be headed for being the story of 2017’s MWC event.

Appealing to people’s sense of nostalgia, the 3310 has been seen a clever move by its Finnish creators, and is expected to sell in high volumes for the rest of the year. But the ‘new’ 3310 isn’t a smartphone as such, and is instead labelled as a ‘feature phone,’ one result being much more limited internet connectivity.

The 3310 is powered by the S30+ operating system, which allows web browsing but has a much smaller range of apps than Android or iOS. The single rear facing camera, absent from the original 3310, is also restricted to a mere two megapixels. The new version does come with a slightly bigger screen and for the first time, also comes in colour.

It’s also only about half the thickness of the original and has 10 times the talk time. The fact that it comes with 22 hours of continuous talk time and standby time of almost a month, is virtually unheard of in today’s smartphone saturated market. The new 3310 is also charged by micro USB, and even has a headphone socket in the bottom. In 2000, this would have made it one of the most advanced phones ever made!

“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.”