Nokia historically had fantastic hardware, and in Europe they had huge mindshare. I've been to a Vodafone store, and the young lady in Customer Service (very young) knew about the Nokia 6310 and said many people coming to the store were nostalgic about that model. If the 6310 would have been still selling, I would have bought one without a second thought - in many ways they are better than current smartphones (HUGE effective battery life in standby, on the order of a couple of weeks. Great signal in most circumstances, including "middle of nowhere" places - compared to most of their competitors. Decent preloaded applications. Deterministic and very good performance - my LG Optimus Sol suffers greatly here, sometime it will launch a call at 10+ seconds after clicking on the green phone button, and it always took at least a couple of seconds to disconnect a phone call)
Remember that at the time, there were no "premium" Windows phones - nothing to compete against the iPhone's milled Aluminum case, or against some or another premium Android devices.