Less than 100 hours we brought you images and specifications of an unannounced Nokia device called the 603. Today it’s been officially announced and we’re sad to say that the predictions we made about the 603 are far from accurate. We thought it would be an ultra low end Symbian Belle device, but it isn’t. The 603 has the same 1 GHz processor as the 600, 700, and 701. It has the same NFC capabilities. It has the same quadband GSM and pentaband 3G support. It even has WiFi b/g/n and GPS. What makes the 603 different from the 600 is the screen size. The 603 rocks a 3.5 inch screen while the 600 has to make due with just 3.2 inches. Both devices have the same 640 x 360 pixel resolution that all touch enable Symbian devices have had since the 5800 shipped more than 3 years ago in April 2008. How much is the 603? 200 Euros, just 20 Euros more than the Nokia 600. Does creating an entirely new device, differentiated by nothing more than a minor increase in screen size, make any sense?
One thing we were right about is that the 603 will be the first Nokia device running Symbian to make use of microSIM cards. According to the detailed specification sheet on Nokia’s developer website, the 603 also comes with 2 microphones that enable uplink noise cancellation. That’s a fancy way of saying you’ll sound better to the person on the other line. One thing the Nokkia 600 has that got chopped off in the 603 is support for FM transmission, the feature that lets you broadcast a shortwave FM radio signal from your mobile phone so that you can hear whatever is playing on your Nokia on your car stereo. That’s not too bad. The 600 also comes with a standard Nokia charging port in addition to a microUSB port, whereas the 603 does microUSB only. We’re just nitpicking at the point; as we said earlier, the only thing people will notice in stores is 3.2 inches versus 3.5 inches.