10 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 36.0 ms ] thread
Come on HMD, couldn't the design be closer to the original? These "revivals" so far look way too different.
Totally agree, this is just a new underpowered feature phone that looks nothing like it's "inspiration".
Nokia a.k.a. HMD had to have been researching whether to go with either full or modified nostalgia, as potential sales today always outdo dreams of recreating yesterday. My guess is Nokia's 2020s-era focus groups probably balked at the smaller screen and smaller buttons of the original. I'd love to see a tree list of all the menu items before I decide on how I like this newer 6310.
I fell for it with the "new" 3310, only to find the phone was so underfeatured it didn't even have a "silent mode" feature.

These new nokias are a pale imitation of their namesakes.

I'm not sure how you didn't see the list of "features" before you opted to buy the newer 3310, but anyway, today there are feature phones running KaiOS that really are not so different in features than what Nokia once offered. I assume that's the target market Nokia is looking at recapturing. If it makes them a profit, great.
You don't expect to have to check for "silent mode" as a "feature" on a checklist. It generally tends to be a bit of a given.

I also have one of their newer feature phones and still find it woefully anaemic compared to a S40 or S60 phone. No copy paste. No backup abilities. No firmware upgrade that I can find. Very limited SMS memory.

I love that HMD / Nokia is focusing so much on feature phones. But where they are going wrong is not focusing on value addition - imitating is good, but nostalgia will only help so much with sales. A good example is their 4g feature phones. It's cool that a 4g feature phone supports VoLTE and RCS (hopefully), and ofcourse, high speed mobile broadband. But none of their 4g phones support hotspot, which seems so silly as that one feature alone would make it so attractive - in the ongoing Pandemic, sales of mobile wifi (MiFi) router has skyrocketed and HMD / Nokia could have easily tapped that with a 4g feature phone with HotSpot. The old Nokia had vision and sharp insights to identify such needs and fulfil it, but that seems to be HMD's sore spot. (And they should avoid the crap that is KaiOS and stick with Symbian / Series 60 for feature phones). Perhaps it is a technical thing that they don't have the money to sink into - maybe the cheap, chinese SoC they use for their feature phones don't support Hotspot?
FTFA (picture caption):

> [B]eloved of teenagers when it was first released

Yeah right. This was a "business class" phone; I only ever saw adult professionals with it. The kids used the 3000 series.