Nokia 3310 Debuts At 2017 Mobile World Congress, But May Not Work Anywhere In The World?

The Nokia 3310 was unveiled, with a few impressive improvements, at the 2017 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona early this week. Apart from being able to make phone calls, send and receive SMS, listen to music and take photos (albeit not the quality ones as standard in smartphones), Finnish manufacturer HMD said battery life is 22 hours on active use and up to a month if it is on standby. Gizmodo reported. Moreover, the classic mobile game “Snake,” among other games, is installed on the phone.

CNET believes that the phone, which was first released in 2000, appears to be an attempt by HMD to bring back loyal fans of the brand to its fold through nostalgia. But it remains to be seen whether HMD will be able to successfully convert the fans to its future products.

Ben Wood, an analyst at CCS Insight, said, "The frenzy of nostalgia around the updated 3310 will deliver some much-needed consumer awareness that Nokia-branded devices are back on the shelves."

Andrew Griffin for The Independent agrees, considering that the name of the consumer market game is “the more advanced, the better.”

“While many parts of the phone have been updated, the new version of the handset still communicates with networks using the same old frequencies: 900 MHz and 1800 MHz, used for the kind of 2G communications that sent calls and texts before mobile internet caught on. But those frequencies have already been turned off in much of the world – including in the US and Canada – and they are gradually being switched off in many of the countries that still use them, too,” he wrote.