Oh, how the mighty have fallen? Nokia’s fall from grace in the mobile phone business is pretty well documented, but unlike Blackberry, they are still churning out new phones. Granted, their latest effort, which was announced by HMD, is not a smartphone that will blow the Pixel XL or iPhone 7 Plus out of the water, but rather, is a bread-and-butter $26 Nokia 150 handset. This is the first device from HMD after they inked a licensing deal with Nokia that will span a decade.
HMD Global set up this particular business vehicle in order to make sure that Nokia-branded devices will continue to make their way to the market, and it remains to be seen just how well will the Nokia 150 in the months to come. The Nokia 150 is no doubt a very, very basic device. It will not have the bells and whistles associated with the most affordable smartphones, but rather, will be a hot ticket item in developing countries. Taking on a candy bar form factor, the Nokia 150 will arrive in two variants -- single SIM and dual SIM, just to keep up with the times.
Obviously the features, as well as hardware specifications, will be extremely limited, and you will not find quantum leaps in terms of technology, as the Nokia 150 is essentially similar in nature to its previous devices before the licensing agreement with HMD Global, such as the Nokia 130, Nokia 105, and Nokia 216, among others.
You will find it that the Nokia 150 arrives with a 2.4-inch display, an integrated FM radio as a throwback to those pre-MP3 days, MP3 playback support, a VGA camera with a LED flash, Bluetooth connectivity, and its most touted feature -- the battery life. It is said that the single SIM version of the Nokia 150 will be able to last for a whopping 31 days on standby, and 25 days on standby for the dual-SIM model. This ought to be handy when you are in remote areas and simply need a simple communications device to chat or keep in touch.
Just in case you would like to kill some time in the middle of nowhere, there is no Play Store or App Store to download high tech games, but rather, you will have to be satisfied with a classic like Snake Xenzia or Nitro Racing from Gameloft. Expect the Nokia 150 to be made available to everyone worldwide next year -- although worldwide here would mean select markets in Europe, APAC, and IMEA regions. No exact release date has been set just yet, although we do know it ought to be deployed before the first quarter of 2017 comes to a close. We do hope to see dumb phones, or feature phones if you would like to refer to them with a more endearing and encouraging term, pick up the pace in terms of hardware specifications down the road.
Hopefully, there will be some sort of ruggedness included on the cheap in the future -- being waterproof and shockproof to a certain extent would certainly make the next model a whole lot more impressive and attractive.
