Microsoft Hasn't Given Up On the Non-Smart Phones It Inherited From Nokia 66
jfruh writes: Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia's handset business was mostly focused on gaining a hardware line that ran the company's Windows Phone OS; but in the process, Microsoft also gained ownership of some model lines that are classified as "feature phones" and some that are straight up dumb, and they're still coming out with new models, confusingly still bearing the "Nokia" brand. The $20 Nokia 105 as billed as "long-lasting backup device" and comes with an FM radio, while the $30 Nokia 215 is "Internet-ready" and comes with Facebook and Twitter apps.
Cheap Nokia have great reputation (Score:5, Insightful)
It would actually make sense to use a smart phone as a digital assistant and carry these cheap phones for voice and text. Many of us still wear watches right? Same way, the smart phones are actually personal computers, it is better to have an independent device with its own long lasting battery for voice and text.
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possibly the best selling microsoft device from last year was running android.
the nokia X series.
microsoft axed it. of course.
microsoft(or nokia) had these featurephones in the pipeline already and they're profitable.
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80s landline quality is a vast improvement over every cell phone I've talked on in the past 20 years.
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Try amr wideband then, also called HD Voice. I've had it happen one time where a person had the phone on speaker, and I could hear somebody whispering to them from across the room.
Both devices must support the feature though, and so must your carrier. T-Mobile has supported it for about 3 years now, not sure about Sprint, but Verizon and AT&T have picked it up recently I'm pretty sure.
Re: HD VOIP (Score:2)
It's apparently more complicated than that. AT&T and Verizon have started offering it, on LTE phones, but it's rolling out slowly on a geography-by-geography basis, rather than being available everywhere at once.
* (Disclaimer: I work for AT&T, so I should probably know this stuff, but I do network security, not mobile phones.)
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Did you buy a Nokia or some other brand? As in general I have found Nokia cheap phones to have a much better voice quality than most of the expensive smart phones and the battery life to be good
I have a 3-4 year old Nokia 101 as backup phone that I got via an Indian acquaintance and even with the original old battery it lasts "forever" as in 2+ weeks of standby, it used to last closer to a month as new. And the voice quality is better than my nexus 5..
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Nokia dumb phones also have a good reputation in the first and the second world countries. They are good for older people or for those who prefer simplicity and battery life.
They are good for people who want a phone to make phone calls and nothing else. They are also good for people who want to have an emergency phone in the car, for example, with a battery that lasts forever. Mine used to last more than half a year while not used. The carriers hated PAYG customers without a monthly contract. But for £20 + £10 one time payment for some minutes, you are always in contact with the world if everything else goes wrong.
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Just remember to actually use the phone from time to time or the carrier will deactivate it (i'm assuing from your use of £ that you are in the UK like me) and at least with O2 a deactivation means you lose all your credit.
From what I can gather americans get much worse terms on payg than we do.
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Not just in third world countries. I used a $14 candybar Nokia when camping where my smartphone would remain in the car, or at home, and that the cell number used was only known to a few people.
I'd not hesitate to buy one. Since it is a dual-SIM model, it can always have its own line, and when I don't need to carry a smartphone with me, I can move my main phone's SIM into it just in case I needed to call out.
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>> and some that are straight up dumb, and they're still coming out with new models, confusingly still bearing the "Nokia" brand.
Why should they give up or rename their most profitable business (as of phones)?
http://communities-dominate.bl... [blogs.com]
Do they sell these in US or EU? (Score:2)
It's nice that there are cheap 2G phones in India, but I need a phone that works in the US, and wouldn't mind having a cheap phone that can also work in Europe. These days that means at least 3G, or maybe LTE, because the US carriers are phasing out 2G as fast as they can to recycle the spectrum. And it would be really nice to have a $30 spare dumb-phone to keep in the car or to use at times it's not convenient to keep my smartphone charged.
My last dumb-phone had a 2-week battery life. 90% of the time, I
Oh, also Bluetooth (Score:2)
Somebody else mentioned Bluetooth, and yeah, I do want that, because my car radio now supports it, so it lets me have a decent speakerphone in the car instead of having a wired headset, and that probably adds $5 to the cost of the phone.
Long battery life plus ease of use (Score:3)
hit submit too early (Score:5, Insightful)
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After having a smartphone for ~5 years - I'm growing tired of the touch screen concept. My first smartphone had a slide out keyboard - my current iPhone is 100% touch. Before that a flip phone.
Oh how I yearn for the simple "UI" of the flip phone. It rings?! flip it open. Works whether your hands are wet or dry. My slide out Palm Pre - when it was wet the touch screen didn't work well --- but okay just slide out the keyboard and it acted like a flip to answer the call. iPhone doesn't have plan B.
Last
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In some other countries there are cheap plans.
In Finland I pay 69 cents/month for my basic phone plan that does not include anything. Any time I call or text It costs me 6.9 cents/minute or text message.
(Incoming texts/calls are free as in our system the caller pays more to call to mobiles from landlines).
Such a plan is great for a backup phone.
In the UK, it's free (Score:2)
Pay-As-You-Go phones don't have a monthly tariff.
One network, GiffGaff, you get free 0800 calls, free calls to other GiffGaff users for 6 months after you topup and you can even get free minutes for helping people. Calls are 8p a min though.
With the other one I use, 3, it's 3p a text, 3p a min to phone.
What actually happened (Score:3)
Right after the acquisition, they decided to lay off the team responsible for the 'non-smart' phones so that all development funds can be channeled into the 'non-dumb' phones.
However, due to a glitch at accounting, they forgot to hand out slips or cancel payroll. The team members were already prohibited from mingling with the rest of the crew, lest some smartish feature creeps into the product ideation. So they lived their corporate lives unknowingly and developed the goodies and then it was too late.
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Unfortunately, some mingling did occur resulting in some smartphone features:
the $30 Nokia 215 is "Internet-ready" and comes with Facebook and Twitter apps.
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They made everybody move to the basement, and took away their red staplers.
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Why are "feature phones" still a thing? (Score:2)
With the costs of low-end Android handsets (even those aimed at the developing world) being so cheap these days, why does it still make sense for manufacturers to make a phone in between a "dumb phone" (that has no internet access, no installable apps, no Java and just does calls, text and maybe music playback and some built-in crappy games) and a full-on smartphone?
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Google's pressure (probably sensible, some low-end Android devices are utterly goddamn awful and you wouldn't want your name within a mile of
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two words: battery life
Re:Why are "feature phones" still a thing? (Score:4, Informative)
No kidding. I recently replaced my old Android 2.3 phone. Part of the reason I replaced it was because it wouldn't make it past 2:00 PM most days if I didn't charge it. After getting my new phone I did a factory reset on the old one. I charged it up, unplugged it, and left it on the night table. Came back 2 days later to be pleasantly surprised that it still had over 50% battery life. Because it didn't have anything to do, the battery lasted quite long. Then I decided I wanted to use it for a few simple games. I registered the device with my Google account and installed Minecraft. And that is all I installed. Now it only lasts about 12 hours for a charge. Somehow, simply having the thing connected to my Google account means that the battery life goes down from 3+ days to 12 hours. The device is pretty much completely useless as a "smart phone" but acting as dumb phone it works pretty well. I assume If I only loaded programs on it that didn't run in the background so much, that battery life would be fine, and I'd still be able to use it as a feature phone. I'll have to disconnect my Google account to see if that clears it up. Hopefully the installed programs will still work after I've disconnected my account.
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The problem is "Google Play Services". Once you sign up with your Google account, it starts phoning home and reporting your GPS position. Especially on older hardware that causes serious battery drain.
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The problem is getting the apps I already paid for on the phone without signing up for Google Play Services. I'll have to sign up, download all the apps I want, including something like Titanium backup. Then I have to backup the applications I want to use. Then I'll have to factory reset the phone again, to remove google play services. Then I'll have to re-install the apps using ADB, because there isn't even a file manager that comes default on the device that will allow apps to be installed directly fro
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Because carriers are assholes and charge you more for using a smartphone on their network than using a feature phone.
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Only in America...
Seriously, only on America.
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I imagine that one barrier to reasonably stock android is screen: all the default Android UI/UX very strongly assumes that you have a screen of decent resolution, typically multiple point touch is expected unless it's a
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I'd second that question. Genuine 'dumbphones' are still way too cheap(and very easy on the battery) for Android to be relevant; but 'featurephone' BoM and specs start to head toward the land of Allwinner, Mediatek, and other somewhat downmarket but adequately punchy Android-oriented SoCs.
I imagine that one barrier to reasonably stock android is screen: all the default Android UI/UX very strongly assumes that you have a screen of decent resolution, typically multiple point touch is expected unless it's a set top box setup. Dumbphones, by contrast, frequently still have smaller, lousier, screens, non-touch, and a UI that depends on buttons only(or a blackberry-style little touch area).
As long as you don't care about Google's blessing, there's no reason you couldn't build your horrible little ecosystem of crap on top of Android, rather than BREW(and whatever its analogs are in GSM land) and one of the dinky JVMs, so I have to imagine that licensing costs for those components are something that vendors don't try their luck on, so maybe that keeps them in the market?
It's hard to beat the truly "dumb" phones in terms of ruggedness and reliability, but I truly loved the "high end phones" of the 2005-2010 era. My EnV / LG Voyager and related ones (candybar, but flipped open to a chiclet QWERTY keyboard) had a good mix of "advanced" features for the time, while still getting a good 2-3 days between charges. (The camera on one of those had a configurable exposure time, which allowed for some pretty amazing starry-night shots when set to 15s... Hell, my current phones can't
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With the costs of low-end Android handsets (even those aimed at the developing world) being so cheap these days, why does it still make sense for manufacturers to make a phone in between a "dumb phone" (that has no internet access, no installable apps, no Java and just does calls, text and maybe music playback and some built-in crappy games) and a full-on smartphone?
Because there are still people who don't give a shit about internet/apps/java on a small screen mobile computer?
I want my phone to be able to do calls/sms. For the rest I have a tablet and a computer.
When You Just Need a Phone (Score:2)
Whether or not you like smart phones, there are plenty of attributes that give basic phones with no bells and whistles a clear advantage, making them suited to purposes smart phones fail miserably in:
It all hinges on simplicity - Good designs tend to have a single purpose which makes the design simple, and all of the above advantages are a results of that attribute. My one annoyance with basic phones today is that their OS (while small and simple) are extremely prete
I reverted back to a dumb phone (Score:1)
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Windows smart phones are basically the same since they are no apps for it and the IE browser isn't compatible with any mobile-friendly sites. The Nokia Maps is nice though.
Related (Score:2)
Very popular in third world countries .... (Score:2)
The cheap Nokia feature phones are very popular in developing countries.
They are inexpensive, durable, the battery last for many days, and they do the job. Moreover, accessories are dirt cheap as well.
Need a charger? Need a battery? They are sold in haberdasheries and corner stores for very little local money.
It would be really dumb if Microsoft just killed that revenue stream.