The biggest surprise of Mobile World Congress 2017 was Nokia’s launch of the new 3310. It was a 2G phone in a 4G world and it took the show by storm.
The biggest surprise of Mobile World Congress 2018 was Nokia’s launch of the new 8110, a 4G version of it’s third most iconic phone. And that’s what was surprising. Nokia chose to bring back the 8110 and not the 6310. The obvious follow-up to the 3310 would have been Nokia’s most successful business phone, a device which still has a dedicated fan base.
Indeed it was such a hit than when Nokia dropped the 6310, Vodafone got into discussions with Nokia about buying the rights to continue the manufacture. I regularly encounter people who are still in love with the old Nokia. In it’s day it was advanced with Bluetooth and data, but today it’s a technology dinosaur. But one which has a surprisingly high price. One Amazon vendor has them at top smartphone money
One of the celebrity fans of the 6310 is ex-Formula 1 driver and Le Mans winner, Richard Attwood, now in his 70s, Attwood is still one of the fastest men on four wheels, regularly out-racing young bucks who are a quarter of his age.
I was amused when he pulled a Nokia 6310 from his pocket, a phone which is only a tad younger than current F1 driver Max Verstappen. It’s a classic phone and I was excited because I’m a phone geek.
Attwood uses it precisely because he’s not. Indeed he said he’d bought a couple of spares should his Nokia go wrong. Here was a man who was practiced at shaving tenths of a second off a lap of Silverstone but wasn’t too concerned if he didn’t read an email for a day or two. He told me that if he was instructing for Porsche he’d leave his phone in the office for the day and check his messages when he got back. Compare this with recent research which says that most people look at their phone 300 times a day.
But the thing about Richard Attwood’s view about modern technology is that it is what marketing types would call “on trend”, there is a growing interest in making life more simple. The reboot of the Nokia 3310 has seen an amazing amount of interest in a phone which only does talking and text. It’s good to know that over 50 years after he first lined up on the F1 grid, Attwood is still in pole position.
But Attwood and all the other 6310 lovers have a problem. It’s 2G and as a thirty-year-old technology, there is less and less investment going into the networks. Capacity at 900 MHz and 1800MHz is increasingly being migrated to 4G, and much of the new infrastructure is 4G-only relying on Voice over LTE to do calls. We can expect there to be a sniff of 2G for quite a while but it will become increasingly difficult for all the 6210, and other 2G mobile phone, users to get a signal. What they want is a 4G version of their beloved phone.
So will Nokia have a New 6310 at Mobile World Congress next month? If it does no-one will be surprised.
