Finally! Nokia 3310 re-launch takes place in Barcelona ahead of #mwc2017

The Nokia 3310 re-launch took place ahead of this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona

The handset is noticeably slimmer than the original Nokia 3310 which sold around 126 million units before it was discontinued in 2005.

One new and remarkable thing about the new device is that, the device will weigh half the weight of the original device that weighed 133g, the new one will weigh 79g.

Developed by HMD, a Finnish Start-up that acquired a ten-year license to use Nokia’s brand name in May 2016, the company CEO Arto Numella, said in a press conference held on Sunday ahead of the Mobile World conference that HMD will continue with the sale of broad range of simple phones in developing markets, but the Nokia 3310 will be sold worldwide. He also added that the three things that mattered was the snake game, battery life as well as the Nokia ringtone.

Nokia 3310 became an iconic due to its indestructible and long life battery nature in 2000 when it was first launched. 17 years on the phone has been relaunched and reports a smaller sleeker and reports a 22 hours of talk time with one month battery life on standby.

The phone also pioneered the Snake 11 game that has since been adopted in other phones and, of course, the new Nokia 3310 also features the Snake II, only that this time you will be able to play it on a coloured screen.

The phone will be available in three colors gloss red, yellow and matte blue and grey. It will also feature a 2.4-inch colour screen, Bluetooth 3.0, an FM radio, LED torch, microSD card support up to 32GB and a two megapixel camera.

It not being your typical smartphone that has the 3G or 4G LTE capabilities, the phone will feature a 2.5G connection, even with that users will be able to even let you go online to access Twitter, Facebook and other services through the Opera Mini browser.

The phone will be priced at £41and will have a release date set for the second quarter of 2017. Though not the highest selling phone for Nokia (Nokia 1100 sold 250 million units), HMD seeks to sell more units in the Smartphone competitive world. The re-launch of the device comes at a time when a report from GSMA dubbed “On Africa’s Mobile Economy” stated that the number of smartphone connections across the continent almost doubled over the last two years reaching 226 million.

At the same event, HMD announced a range of Nokia-branded Android smartphones first being the Nokia 6, which went on-sale in China in January. The phone will launch worldwide in the second quarter of 2017 as well and will be priced at €229. A limited-edition gloss black model will cost €299.

The Nokia 6 will feature a 5.5-inch screen, Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage and a 16MP rear-facing camera. The Nokia 5 and Nokia 3 will cost €189 and €139 respectively.