MagCom
MagCom 3B

Norwegian mobile phone manufacturer MagCom was founded in 1999. The name was conceived by shortening ‘magnesium’ and ‘communications’. The MagCom 3B, which was launched in 2001, was the only phone it ever produced. It was particularly unique because of its magnesium casing. The company believed this was beneficial due to the handset's lower specific absorption rate (SAR). Interestingly, MagCom had hoped to offer the phone with an internal antenna, but it was unable to produce adequate radio frequency (RF) performance, and in the end, it had to opt for a stub antenna. Initially, MagCom hoped that the magnesium casing could be cast, allowing the bare metal to provide the device's final finish. Unfortunately, the quality of the casting was not good enough to achieve this, so the phone had to be painted with silver paint to obtain a satisfactory finish. The MagCom 3B featured a large 64k-pixel black-and-white LCD display, capable of displaying 27 lines of text. This made it ideally suited for displaying content via the basic HTML browser that was supported by the phone. Other applications on the phone, such as the phone book, took advantage of the browser and displayed content via internally generated web pages. Connectivity was provided by basic circuit-switched data (CSD) via a 2G GSM network. Much of the software development was led by CTO Egil Kvaleberg, who helped develop the bespoke user interface software stack for the device. The phone was powered by a 2G Mobilink chipset (Mobilink was later acquired by Broadcom). The phone software was also designed to be easily upgradable by users. This was a relatively unique capability at the time, with most phones having to be returned to a service centre or the manufacturer for a software update. Other features included full native email support, as well as an address book and calendar that could be synchronised with Microsoft Outlook. One little-known feature of the phone was a vibrating alert function. To avoid intellectual property infringements, the designers embedded the vibrator into the battery pack rather than the phone itself. Unfortunately, the phone was not a commercial success, with only a few thousand units being sold, predominantly in the Norwegian market. The original plan had been to sell 60,000 units in the company's first year. By mid-2001, MagCom, which had shrunk from 24 employees to 13 at the time, started to run out of money. After going bankrupt, it was sold to another Norwegian company, Q-Free, in September 2001, and was subsequently renamed Q-Free MagCom. Sadly, the business never recovered, and phone production ceased in 2002. Plans for a follow-up with a colour screen and GPRS support never came to fruition. On this basis, the model in the Mobile Phone Museum collection is considered to be extremely rare.