Nokia is a thing of the past, but for years it was the most popular manufacturer of mobile phones. With iconic models such as the Nokia 1100, the Nokia 3210 or the Nokia 3310, the Finnish company won the public's favor with inexpensive, resistant devices with a long-lasting battery . At a time when you could only call and send SMS messages, mobile telephony had Nokia as its main rival to fight. Luckily, little by little he is catching up without forgetting his glorious past.
Then Apple or Samsung would come. The first would revolutionize the market with his iPhone, forever changing the appearance of telephones and eliminating physical keyboards for the touch screen. For its part, Samsung would take over a large part of the market by offering cheap phones and filling stores with various models. Some Nokia philosophy with Asian tenacity.
Be that as it may, the Nokia of the 2000s gave us some of the best-selling phones as well as other curiosities that drew attention for their eccentricity . However, not all of them had the desired success. Some even stood out more for their hilarity than for their external appearance.
Nokia N-Gage (2002)
With 3 million units sold behind it, the Nokia N-Gage was a risky gamble on the part of the Finnish phone maker. More than a telephone, it was a hybrid of mobile phone and portable video game console .
Released in 2002, its appearance is reminiscent of the Sega Game Gear. Precisely, both pocket consoles tried to cope with the Game Boy . In 2002, the Game Boy Advance was going through a great time behind the previous model, the Game Boy Color. Thanks especially to the success of the Pokémon games .
It received titles such as Call of Duty, Asphalt, FIFA Football 2004, SonicN or Tomb Raider and you could play multiplayer via Bluetooth. It could also emulate Nokia S60 games. But the Game Boy competition and the departure of Sony's PSP two years later made this project unfeasible.
Nokia 3600/3650 (2002/2003)
Accustomed to the rectangular shapes of Nokia such as the Nokia 3310, the Nokia 3600 and its derivative 3650 attracted attention for its rounded bottom . That and its circular keyboard. Instead of arranging the keys in a square or rectangle, numbers and other buttons were arranged around a circle.
Technically, it had a 208×176 pixel screen and a 0.3 megapixel VGA rear camera. It was precisely the first phone with an integrated camera sold in the United States. Also, you could expand the memory with a MMC card .
Nokia 1100 (2003)
Launched in the summer of 2003, the Nokia 1100 is today the world's best-selling phone, especially thanks to its success in countries like India or Bangladesh. A minimalist phone for such particular markets as those mentioned above.
Little can be distinguished from its design. A minimalist rectangle that simplifies the iconic Nokia 3310 to be more resistant, durable and able to perform with GSM networks and little access to electricity. Hence, its battery lasts up to 400 hours in standby.
Nokia 3300 (2003)
Although Nokia was known for its innovation for decades, it also used to take advantage of its discoveries by recycling them into different models. And if you see the Nokia 3300 it will remind you a lot of the N-Gage that we saw before.
Taking into account that the Nokia N-Gage was used for everything: playing games, listening to music, watching videos, calling on the phone… They decided to launch a specific version for the musical theme. The 3300 was a phone and a music player , two in one.
128 x 128 pixel display, 64 MB expandable space with MMC card, support for MP3 and AAC files, built-in FM radio, voice recorder, etc.
Nokia 6800 (2003)
At a time when physical keyboards were the order of the day, Nokia did not give up its efforts to innovate in this regard. For better or worse. Decide yourselves. The Nokia 6800, for example, was a mobile phone very similar to previous models like the Nokia 3310. But it had a peculiarity. You could turn it into a phone with two alphanumeric side keypads. This would make it easier for you to write messages or emails .
Simply by lifting the numeric keypad by default , you turned a phone to use into a mobile advanced to its time that facilitated the writing of long texts. Keep in mind that to write something with the numeric keyboard you had to “play” with the numbers. And in each number there were three or more possible letters. A nuisance.
The 6800 series featured several models that shared the pull-out keyboard type but with different case styles. While the 6800 was dual-band GSM, the 6810 was tri-band.
Nokia 7600 (2003)
The Nokia 7600 is possibly the rarest phone Nokia has ever designed. How to define it? A screen surrounded by a frame with buttons and, finally, two more frames. Wikipedia defines its shape as tear or drop of water , but you have to use imagination.
On a technical level, it stood out as Nokia's second 3G phone. Its screen was 128 x 160 pixels. It had a 0.3 megapixel rear camera.
Nokia 7280 (2004)
Another of the most innovative Nokia designs is the 7280 model. With a 208 x 104 pixel and 65,000 color TFT screen, this phone was shaped like a stick control, remote control or, more precisely, as a video recorder. voice. Hence, it had 70 voice commands, voice recorder, stereo FM radio, etc.
Source: GSMArena Another of its peculiarities was its camera, hidden by default. To show it you had to remove part of the casing, in the purest style of the tiny cameras of the spy movies .
Nokia N90 (2005)
As if it were a digital camera, the Nokia N90 could move its components like a Rubik's cube and thus arrange it to record video comfortably. But a picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes. Specifically, the screen could rotate up to 270 degrees .
With a screen TFT LCD of 352×416 pixels and an external one, also TFT LCD, of 128 x 128 pixels, the purpose of this phone was to act as a digital camera. Hence, it integrated a 2 megapixel camera with autofocus, digital zoom of up to 20x and flash. What's more, its manufacturer was Konica Minolta .
The Nokia N90 was used both to take photos and to record video in MP4 format at a resolution of 352×288. Its 31 MB of storage comes in flash memory. Expandable to 64 MB or 128 MB via MMC card.
Nokia 3250 (2006)
Following the moving part dynamics of the previous phone, Nokia released the Nokia 3250 with a keyboard that rotated 90 degrees . Otherwise it continued with the rectangular shape of the classic Nokia 3310 but with a more robust appearance.
Source: Nokia Museum 176×208 pixel TFT screen, 2 megapixel camera and 4x zoom, 2 GB memory expandable via microSD… The keyboard was the most striking thing. It combined a classic numeric keyboard with another made up of music controls . It could record audio and video and take pictures at a resolution of 1600×1200.
