"My husband has never allowed me to write, as he doesn't want me touching mens pens."
"I bought it for all my female friends and relatives. It enabled them, finally, to write things (although they may not yet know to do so on paper; but you can only expect so much, really)."
Is there a reason why this isn't Nokia branded? It seems insane to me that HMD own the most respected phone brand in history and... just choose not to use it for some of their phones? I feel like I'm missing something about the HMD/Nokia situation here.
This seems like a kids phone, so the "decision making unit" should be the parents in the end. I am sure they would know about Nokia, that they were happy users years ago and buy the brand again for their kids.
0.3mp is good enough for kitsch. It’s appropriate, and given the audience, this ensures a low level of information leakage in the form of naively snapped photos. Low-res is an arguable win for this feature set, speaking as a Parent.
Most likely bc their license for the Nokia branding is running out in 2026.
aside, but relevant:
HMD is largely made up from old Nokia mobile phone hw guys and they probably feel that they've now established themselves in the market as "The guys that did the Nokia Android phone smartphone reawakening". They probably feel that they have some leeway to try out new stuff.
I do not think so they are established since Microsoft dented Nokia. Nokia is history and the people who has nostalgia about their old Nokia phones are dying. Newer generation only knows Apple or Samsung. They do not care about Nokia. They certainly should stop thinking getting success now, just because they were successful 20 years ago. Market has changed.
When they made a comeback back in 2017, there was enthusiasm in the market from the old Nokia users. Even then they failed to produce some good devices. Their phones were expensive and less features with other rivals. Just because Nokia has reputation for creating robust phones, which certainly cost a lot, you have to sacrifice a lot of features just to put your phone in metal enclosure. They tried for couple of years, and they just give up. Now they just try to attract old people to buy their Keypad phones. We see no innovation in keypad phones too. Just old phones getting released at heigh price in cheaper plastic than original ones.
Certainly, there is a lot of room in keypad phones especially in developing nations. Just make it cheap and with a lot features. People will buy that phone having Nokia branding than a Chinese branded cheap keypad phone having same features.
Even back in T9 days i preferred to write "manually" - then again i don't really write that much on my phone.
That said, i'd rather get something like a PinePhone, the software might be worse than most Android devices but at least i can replace/rewrite/do_something_with it.
I do find the full sized keyboards an interesting situation, where I should be able to type but since moving on from the iPhone 3g I absolutely fail at being able to hit the keys correctly.
Hitting the period instead of space is extremely common, as are many other typos.
I miss my Blackberry keyboard. Everything else is so much better these days.
A few other models from the same line also have it IIRC, but they're all based on KaiOS and they end up being barely usable. I don't think it's their fault, I'm not sure it's even possible/EULA-compliant to use the service if not via the clients Meta gives you.
I guess my point is more that I wish the communication styles enabled by smartphones and the social expectations they carry weren't the norm. I'm not even really sure what I would do if I could wish my own phone into existence.
There are couples of not-too-outdated Android based LTE flip phones if you really need one, and most of them run apks so long it runs on 512MB-1GB RAM and without GMS.
> I guess my point is more that I wish the communication styles enabled by smartphones and the social expectations they carry weren't the norm. I'm not even really sure what I would do if I could wish my own phone into existence.
I also broadly agree with the usual laundry list of complaints: closed platforms, surveillance, ads, lack of innovation, smartphones being more like status symbols than actual pieces of technology.
It's a pocket-sized "personal computer" bundled with a cellular phone. But it is designed to be "impossible" for the owner to exercise control over it. Garbage.
Of course, for the companies that control these "smartphones", they are not garbage.
Long time ago, I worked on a project for a Korean cellphone vendor. Our task was to customize, fix bugs and implement a few features whenever a new model was going to be released in LATAM.
A colleague of mine bought (on a store) one of the models that was going to be released in another country. He customized it with a Disney Princesses theme and glued a few stickers. He gave it as a birthday present to his daughter. A unique model nobody else had.
Still waiting for a hardened feature phone with Signal (and SimpleX going forward) and IMEI spoofing. The PinePhone has IMEI spoofing but the software is not focused on just being a good phone. Graphene is much more than I need. The LTE baseband should be isolated from the phone's operating system, essentially only providing an IP interface.
You keep same IMSI but want to rotate IMEI??? If you want to change just IMEI just once, there should be plenty of phones reprogrammable through malware-included leaked manufacturing tools. They're not interested in locking that part down.
That a newly released phone is advertised as purposely missing features "better" phones have. Not only that but such a lack of capability is deemed important enough to proudly place in the product advertisement
It is worth wondering how long product designers can keep adding features to smartphones to justify the frequent upgrade cycle
And also worth wondering about if all the increase in capability of devices is really an meaningful increase in usefulness/happiness from the device usage, if some consumers are starting to crave less capable phones
Readit News
USB-C and LTE, but a 0.3 MP camera is a very odd combination. I'm impressed that it's even possible to source a camera module this crappy in 2024.
But the camera, not sure why you'd even bother.
It does work very well for this screen resolution.
And what else would you do with this media given it's a feature phone?
Send it to someone? It probably supports MMS. Or transfer it to your computer over USB-C/bluetooth.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/reviews/B004FTF6H4/
Excerpts:
"My husband has never allowed me to write, as he doesn't want me touching mens pens."
"I bought it for all my female friends and relatives. It enabled them, finally, to write things (although they may not yet know to do so on paper; but you can only expect so much, really)."
aside, but relevant: HMD is largely made up from old Nokia mobile phone hw guys and they probably feel that they've now established themselves in the market as "The guys that did the Nokia Android phone smartphone reawakening". They probably feel that they have some leeway to try out new stuff.
When they made a comeback back in 2017, there was enthusiasm in the market from the old Nokia users. Even then they failed to produce some good devices. Their phones were expensive and less features with other rivals. Just because Nokia has reputation for creating robust phones, which certainly cost a lot, you have to sacrifice a lot of features just to put your phone in metal enclosure. They tried for couple of years, and they just give up. Now they just try to attract old people to buy their Keypad phones. We see no innovation in keypad phones too. Just old phones getting released at heigh price in cheaper plastic than original ones.
Certainly, there is a lot of room in keypad phones especially in developing nations. Just make it cheap and with a lot features. People will buy that phone having Nokia branding than a Chinese branded cheap keypad phone having same features.
That said, i'd rather get something like a PinePhone, the software might be worse than most Android devices but at least i can replace/rewrite/do_something_with it.
Hitting the period instead of space is extremely common, as are many other typos.
I miss my Blackberry keyboard. Everything else is so much better these days.
I guess my point is more that I wish the communication styles enabled by smartphones and the social expectations they carry weren't the norm. I'm not even really sure what I would do if I could wish my own phone into existence.
> I guess my point is more that I wish the communication styles enabled by smartphones and the social expectations they carry weren't the norm. I'm not even really sure what I would do if I could wish my own phone into existence.
I also broadly agree with the usual laundry list of complaints: closed platforms, surveillance, ads, lack of innovation, smartphones being more like status symbols than actual pieces of technology.
Of course, for the companies that control these "smartphones", they are not garbage.
A colleague of mine bought (on a store) one of the models that was going to be released in another country. He customized it with a Disney Princesses theme and glued a few stickers. He gave it as a birthday present to his daughter. A unique model nobody else had.
How is S30 not dead? I think it a lot more interesting then yet another app adding AI.
Remember the cool LED patterns on the Nothing phone? It’s notable when people try to bring new mobile phone concepts to market.
It is worth wondering how long product designers can keep adding features to smartphones to justify the frequent upgrade cycle
And also worth wondering about if all the increase in capability of devices is really an meaningful increase in usefulness/happiness from the device usage, if some consumers are starting to crave less capable phones