The Nokia 2110, or how a dead guitarist's exercise became a ringtone
In 1993, two Nokia executives sat down with a recording of the complete Gran Vals — a classical guitar piece that the Spanish composer Francisco Tárrega had written in 1902 and never published. Anssi Vanjoki, then executive vice president, and Lauri Kivinen, head of corporate communications, listened through to the end. At bars 13 through 16, they stopped. That eight-second phrase in A major became the sound that would reach an estimated 1.8 billion listeners a day by 2009.
The phone they were choosing a ringtone for was the Nokia 2110, which arrived in January 1994 with an internal sales target of 400,000 units. It sold 20 million.
The 2110 was Nokia’s second GSM phone and the first designed from scratch for the digital standard — not an analogue handset updated with new firmware, but a device built around the assumption that the analogue era was finished. GSM, ratified in 1987 and commercially deployed from 1991, had replaced a patchwork of incompatible national networks across Europe. A Finn on an analogue phone roaming into Germany was a billing problem nobody could fully solve. On GSM, he was just a subscriber. The 2110 was the first Nokia phone that started from that world rather than translating itself into it.
Designed by Frank Nuovo, the 2110 measured 56×148×25mm and weighed 236 grams — the smallest GSM phone on the market when it launched. Its interface introduced two dynamic softkeys: physical buttons whose on-screen labels changed depending on context, so the same key that opened the address book in one menu became “Send” in another. In 1994, most phone interfaces were dedicated buttons and physical dials. The 2110 had software, and the software had opinions about what you were doing.
It stored 100 contacts, could receive SMS, and after a software update could send them too. The ringtone that would become famous was listed in its menu as Type 5 — one of ten options, with no special status. It didn’t become the “Nokia Tune” until 1998, when the Nokia 6110 gave the excerpt a name. Tárrega had written Gran Vals as a parlour guitar exercise. He died in 1909, fifty-three years before the GSM standard was even conceived.
The 2110 won Business Week’s product of the year in 1995. At the GSM World Conference in Cannes in February 1996, it was voted outstanding phone of the year. But the more important thing it won was the market. Nokia’s projection had been 400,000 — conservative, for a device aimed at European business executives at premium prices through Vodafone’s EuroDigital package. The actual figure, across the original 2110, the reinforced 2110i, and a set of regional variants for different networks, was twenty million. That revenue paid for the product pipeline that made Nokia the world’s largest mobile handset manufacturer by 1998, a position the company held for fourteen straight years.
The Tárrega fragment, chosen for a phone with a three-year commercial lifespan, outlasted it by decades. Phones became cameras, then computers, then wallets, then AI assistants. The tune played through all of it.
Sources
- Nokia tune — Wikipedia — Gran Vals origin (Tárrega, 1902), Vanjoki and Kivinen’s 1993 selection, the 1.8 billion daily listeners estimate (2009).
- Nokia 2110 — Wikipedia — launch date, GSM first-principles design, SMS capability, variant lineup.
- Nokia 2110 — Mobile Phone Museum — Frank Nuovo design credit, smallest GSM phone claim, dynamic softkeys.
- Nokia 2110 — Mobile Phone History — 400,000 target vs 20 million sold, GSM World Conference 1996 award, Vodafone EuroDigital packaging.