The Nokia saga has been one that’s been running for a few years now, and it has fascinated those of a certain age that grew up with Nokia phones, after all, they were once the iPhones of their day. We all know what happened to Nokia, of course, the firm decided to go in with Microsoft where smartphones were concerned, and while it seemed to be working for them at first, the whole affair soon went south. In the end, Microsoft ended up buying the beleaguered smartphone business from Nokia, leaving the phone giant without the ability to actually sell a smartphone. The time period that the two parties agreed upon has now passed, and Nokia is able to sell Nokia phones once again, and recently signed a licensing deal with the newly-formed HMD Global to work with Foxconn on producing new Nokia devices. Now, the firm is introducing their first device in years, but it’s not what you will have been hoping for.
The simply-named Nokia 150 is available in either single or dual SIM variants, and is what some people might call a “dumbphone” in so much that this is a simple phone you might have used a decade or more ago. Available for, roughly after conversion, $25 however, it’s hard to argue with such value. What the Nokia 150 does do, however, is bring classic games back to the market, as well as a built-in FM radio, that classic Nokia font and of course, a super-long battery life. The 1,020 mAh battery inside of the Nokia 150 is rated for 22 hours of talk time and a Nokia-tastic standby time of 31 days on a single charge, which can be topped up via good old microUSB.
Clearly, the Nokia 150 is not something that we would be interested in, but we have to hand it to Nokia, the marketing material – such as the below YouTube video – is something we’d be more likely to see when reading up about a new high-end smartphone. If the firm can make this much fuss about a standard, cheap 2.5G featurephone, then maybe they’re hope for their big push which is likely to come next year and hopefully include some quality Android models.