If you miss the days when a mobile phone was just a phone for calls and texts and want to cut back on the time you spend staring at your smartphone screen then nostalgic brand Nokia has three new phones you might be interested in. There has been a rise in interest in ‘dumbphones’, so-called because they are the opposite of smartphones, and Nokia has just released three new candybar style handsets that recall the company’s glory days of the late 1990s and early 2000s. All these mobiles can really do is call, text, and yes – play Snake.
Though they bear the Nokia brand, the phones are made by a company called HMD, which licences the famous Finnish name for its simple phone line up. HMD has previously re-released new editions of classic Nokia blowers, most famously rebooting the Nokia 3310 in 2017. The three new phones are new creations, though.
You can pick up the cheapest of these new phones for just £54.99. The Nokia 213 4G comes in peach, black, or dark blue colours and doesn’t even have a camera. You can also grab the Nokia 225 4G for £5 more and get a small pocketable phone with a camera, Bluetooth, headphone jack, USB-C charging, removable battery, and MP3 player and radio built in.
For £64.99, the Nokia 235 4G has a better camera and more premium design. You can slip your SIM card from your smartphone into any three of these new feature phones if you need a bit of a digital detox away from the modern barrage of notifications and apps that keep you hooked to your smartphone screen.
“The Nokia 215 4G, the Nokia 225 4G and the Nokia 235 4G are beautiful pocket-sized feature phones with adaptable functionality,” said Adam Ferguson, Global Head of Insight, Proposition and Product Marketing at HMD. “At HMD we are all about developing products to meet our consumers’ needs. Some people will use the phone to disconnect, tune out and live in the moment.”
We often daydream about using a feature phone and leaving our smartphone behind, but it often feels like too much a barrier to modern life. Do you think you could go without WhatsApp, Google Maps, payment apps, and banking apps on a daily basis?
It’s definitely possible, but living the feature phone life looks like it will require more than a bit of willpower and adjusting how you live your life. We are all certainly more available these days thanks to smartphones, and that can have a negative affect on our mental health at times.
But it’s also amazing that we can FaceTime someone on the other side of the world for free – something none of the new Nokia phones can do as they’re restricted to calls and texts. At least they all use 4G, so the impending closure of the UK’s 3G networks won’t render them unusable.
