Its not so much that NEC were pioneers of the early 3G technology, rather that they failed to follow through (2 years since the e338, the last they produced here!) - anyone who remembers the original One2One phone will remember how cringeworthy that was. But time moved on and the handsets developed.
My main angst with NEC is that they simply did not follow through after the e338 which was, as E616Vboy123 rightly says, did help the bottom end of the market. But is that really where NEC wanted to reside and become [in]famous for? Because if it is then they succeeded in bucketloads.
Their [NEC's] name has becom synonymous for low-quality, bug-ridden, low battery-life and generally unreliable handsets. For sure, 3's head in the sand, secretive and downright dishonest approach to the Customer Services back-up for these early problems did nothing to help NEC's image as a handset producer. But we can only lay part of the blame at the feet of 3, NEC could have done more to help themselves.
If NEC were serious about being in the European 3G handset market they would have learned from their early mistakes, capitalised on their domestic experience and sought agreements with other MNOs. Coupled with a complete re-design of the 3G handset they could have capitalised for a short while on the e338's neat design but increased the functionality to meet the 2G challenge.
I quite like the "Buck Rodgers" look and feel of the e606, but it is completely unusable as a practical mobile telephone handset with its ridiculously short battery life and poor quality OS. It works, but like those first One2One PCN handsets, only just! And that is simply not good enough.
NEC, I feel, fell for the 3G hype - all those £ billions in licence fee probably led them into a false security, thinking they could dump simply anything onto our market and be an instant success.
A lesson to the 4G and 5G network builders is not to repeat this complacency, nor to even anticipte anything much more moneywise than can be retrieved over 2G networks.
For the masses, a phone is a phone, and we'll take some convincing otherwise, or of the need for anything more than that (unless we have other requirements). Us lot on here are fairly unrepresentative (praise be!) of the mobile phone user at large.
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