My First Ever 3G Phone Nokia 6120C

The very word ‘smartphone’ sounds to most customers like something bulky, expensive and supplied with a large screen – in the majority of cases this idea is pretty close to the real life nowadays. It’s hard to break stereotypes, and usually that takes time. All the big companies have already estimated their potential profits originating from that segment, and each has developed a strategy of their own regarding expansion on the mentioned ground. But creating an inexpensive and highly functional device isn’t just enough to succeed, one major thing that is essential here and by no means can be neglected is that your product should possess unique features so that it stands out against the background of competitive products. It’s also vitally important to be as careful with the details as possible, because a tiny little feature that turns out badly can ruin the whole affair. Some of the manufacturers place their bets on the decorative appearance of the product, its design, dimensions and form factor, others put their efforts into supplying the customer with all kinds of useful features complementing the canonical GSM functionality – camera, mp3 player and so on. The ‘image’ and ‘stuff’ phones are the two major distinctive groups of mobile products on today’s mid-end market. Another kind of functionality comprising multimedia, office and enhanced web surfing features belongs to the smartphone market sector, a relatively small, but very rapidly expanding part of the mobile market which is not to be neglected by any company who want to secure a commercially successful future for the next few years.

The Nokia developers have been long brooding over a concept of inexpensive yet efficient mass smartphone, but all of their previous attempts were of little avail. Even at the initial moment of smartphone market formation Nokia offered a number of relatively cheap smartphones targeted at a youth audience (like the 3650 model) but the attempts could hardly be seen as successful – the word ‘inexpensive’ still stood for quite a challengeable price as long as much cheaper solutions from the casual phone market were thriving, and the dimensions of a smartphone looked a bit frightening (or at least discomforting) in those days. The next try was the ill-fated N-Gage gaming smartphone – the design and functionality could hardly be deemed acceptable for the large audiences, and the new gaming features weren’t enough to make the device commercially successful. This was also due to the fact that the technologies of those days weren’t advanced enough to let the manufacturer design a really inexpensive and reasonably sized device with a functionality comparable to popular solutions from the casual phone market.

The situation has greatly improved by now, today’s smarphones are no longer expensive and poorly functional toys for the rich yet none of them is known to be really affordable to the masses. The treaty between Nokia and Freescale companies was a major boost to Nokia’s developments in the field of smartphone technology, a reference single-chip platform for inexpensive smartphone solutions was successfully implemented in practice, allowing for creation of high-performance products. The perspectives that open upon the implementation of the above-mentioned platform can hardly be underestimated, since that Nokia had sufficient resources to introduce smartphone products cheap enough for a mass market buyer and at the same time as efficient as the casual phones of the same class.

The first product to pioneer the frontier was Nokia 6290, this was the initial product of the now abundant series of Freescale-based solutions. The model utilizes the folder form-factor and is rather reasonably sized (of course in comparison to products that entered the market at the same time). The price of €320 wasn’t too high for a smartphone as well, yet the product could hardly find a niche in the mass market. Nevertheless Nokia 6290 sold well enough to give its developers enough grounds to plan an expansion of the existing concept. It wasn’t long until a sequel was introduced; Nokia 6120 Classic is the smallest, lightest and cheapest smartphone available today, sporting a good functionality and such a combination is truly unique.

The device is positioned not as a pureblood smartphone but as (not-as)-casual phone with expanded functionality. In addition to the lot of its merits, it’s the cheapest SDPA-compatible phone operationable in 3G networks. The product is included in package deals by most European mobile operators (given away for free upon striking the deal, as they put it), no offerings with comparable functionality that are compatible in 3G networks are known to exist.