2003, a snapshot of the year

2003 is a special year for our archive: it's the year UMTS — "3G" — arrived in Italy, bringing with it the first video calls. In our database, 2003 counts 229 real models.

Looking at the comments — not the ratings, but the actual comments left over time by those who used these phones — the most discussed model is the Nokia 3200, with 326 comments. Next is the Siemens MC60 (267) and then the Nokia 3650, with its circular keypad that no one has replicated since. Rounding out the top five are the Nokia 3100 and the Sony Ericsson T610, one of the first camera phones to achieve truly widespread adoption.

On the ratings front, among 2003 models with at least 20 real ratings, the most appreciated is the Samsung SGH S300M (3.3/5), closely followed by the Siemens SX1 — the first Siemens with a Symbian operating system, and with 291 ratings one of the most-rated models of that year overall.

There's also a curiosity worth mentioning: 2003 is also the year of the Nokia N-Gage QD, Nokia's attempt to also be a portable gaming console — 338 real ratings in our archive, making it the most-rated 2003 model overall by number of ratings.

Want to know how the camera, still rare in 2002, became standard starting precisely this year? We tell the story in The Year the Camera Became Normal.