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Nokia has announced its latest phone, and it’s a surefire winner.
The Microsoft-powered Nokia 215, expected to hit shelves by March, weighs one-and-a-half times less than an iPhone 6, can be held comfortably in one hand or two, and comes in three trendy colours: green, black and white.
The price? An astoundingly low $US29.
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In true Nokia fashion, the robust handset looks like it could survive a whole month of drunken Saturdays without suffering even so much as a scratch.
It supports your favourite apps like Twitter and has Facebook messenger built in.
Then there’s the battery life – a single charge will last you an entire month on standby. Take that Apple.
It also has numbered buttons (remember those?) in soft rubber with plenty of space in between each to accommodate your fat fingers, and let you text underneath the table without anyone noticing.
Plus it even comes with an in-built lewd photo censor because, hey, nobody is going to be seeing any detail with that 0.3 megapixel camera.
Okay, so it’s aimed at emerging markets in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, but a few Nokia 215s could definitely find a home here in the pockets of retro-chic hipsters, the budget-conscious and the elderly.
As one astute web citizen recently commented on Facebook: “This will be hipster equipment in no time.”
All jokes aside, this actually sounds pretty handy, at least as a backup for your whizz-bang smartphone, or as the tech equivalent of a green juice cleanse.
Research firm IDC has estimated that 12 per cent of all phones shipped to Australia in the first quarter of 2014 were non-smart phones. That means almost 250,000 ‘dumb’ phones were imported between January and March of last year alone, which is surely enough to make Nokia’s latest release at least a modest success down under.
As tech expert Paul Lin, CEO of leading app agency Buuna, told The New Daily back in December, there is “absolutely” still a market for “no frills” phones in Australia.
Except that this extremely cheap phone still has a few frills. Like an in-built torch. And room for two SIM-cards. Yep, we saved the best till last.
Nokia, the dominant mobile phone company before the rise of Apple, sold its phone division to Microsoft in 2014 after failing to crack the smartphone market, but who knows, it might have finally found its niche — the elegant dumbphone.
For the same price as a cinema ticket, and still capable of running your social media apps, how could you possibly go wrong?
