The global economic downturn has certainly had an impact on the mobile industry, with consumers scaling back on their mobile plans, opting for pre-paid calling, and delaying upgrading to new devices even as they seem eager to embrace smartphones and Internet-enabled mobile devices. But to Finland’s Nokia—which, despite having trouble gaining traction in the consumer smartphone market is still the world’s largest maker of mobile handsets—is still holding a happy thought for golden times. And now its customers can hold that thought too: the company ha just unveiled its Nokia 6700 classic Gold Edition, which is basically the company’s Nokia 6700 classic phone with an 18-carat gold finish.
“The 6700 is an utterly classic device,” the company wrote on its Nokia Conversations blog. “Indeed, designer Mark Delaney describes it as ‘the little black dress’ of phones.”
The Nokia 6700 classic itself carries a reasonable set of specs for a modern phone: a 320 by 340-pixel 2.2-inch display, a 5 megapixel camera, microSD expandable storage, quad-band GSM/EDGE plus tri-band WCDMA and HSDPA/HSUPA mobile broadband, Bluetooth wireless networking, assisted GPS, and a broad range of media and Internet applications, including full HTML Web browsing (both Nokia’s Web browser and Opera Mini) plus navigation services from Ovi Maps.
Nokia expects the 6700 classic Gold Edition will go on sale in selected markets for €370 (before taxes and subsidies) in the first quarter of 2010. Hey, maybe by then the economy will turn around a little bit?
