Helping more and more people around the world get online and stay connected, Microsoft introduces the Nokia 215 and Nokia 215 Dual-SIM.
With a price tag of just $29 before taxes and subsidies, Nokia 215 is our most affordable Internet-ready entry-level phone yet, perfectly suited for first-time mobile phone buyers or as a secondary phone for just about anyone.
I think I’m going to buy one of these, just to see how it holds up. It has most of the services I use on my phone, so I’m wondering if I can take the downgrade while enjoying the crazy awesome battery life.
I say no.
It’s good routine to slip in the charger every night. If a phone only requires charging every week or so, you’re bound to (not) wake up with a dead phone a few times a year. Oh wait, Nokia solved that by making annoying beeps when the battery is near flat. Always fun in the middle of the night. Not.
So.
Battery life on cell phones isn’t a selling point anymore – people got used to it.
With reversible micro usb connectors coming to the next generation phones, it’ll be even easier.
This is a phone for emerging markets, countries where power isn’t always stable. Where you may not even have power in your home, and you go to a local shop and pay to charge your phone.
There is also the situation in these markets where you may have to travel some distance and time to go to markets, for work, etc and you need that long standby time.
Please don’t assume everyone in the world has the same needs or are willing to make the same compromises as you.
Uh? WTF?!?
I recently switched to the Xperia Z3 Compact just to get back a barely decent battery life on my phone (about 3 days of moderate usage; pushed it as far as a full week on light usage), and won’t look back.
We’re talking about a device that has become as ubiquitous as our parent’s watches, but won’t last for as long as 1% of a watch’s battery life!
Oh, well, I get it!
You’re satirically making fun of this crazy situation.
I almost bit it, well done!
“Good routine”, eh! d"Y~` I’ll borrow you that one.
Thanks for the great laugh. d"Y~S
No, Nokia SOLVED that by having the alarm function work even when the phone is completely shut OFF. The problem just is not there on a real nokia phone (apart from lumias that is, as far as I know the feature disappeared when windows phone took over)
You must be really out of touch with normal humans. If you solve battery life by offering 1 week of heavy use without recharging you would have _the_ feature that everyone wants. No high MP, high PPI, stereo speakers, 10GHz 16 core, high end GPU or zoom lens could compete.
I don’t know anyone who even thinks about this issue anymore. Everyone has a charger next to their bed, and plug it in every night.
At this point, they would do it even for their mythical 1-week-on-a-charge phone.
It’s a non-issue.
My wife does. She recently switched from a smart phone back to a flip phone over battery life. She wasn’t using the smart phone features enough to justify the price, so she went prepaid and spends less than $10 month now, and only has to charge her phone every 4-5 days.
Take a look at his: http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/SSS/SSS10/paper/viewFile/1145/136…
It is a breakdown of the demographics of cell phone users in Rwanda. Only 50% had electricity in their homes. Those that do not typically pay a shop, or a friend, to charge their phone. But 75% have bank accounts and use their phone to access their account and to make payments.
So a phone that has to be charged once a day isn’t going to be popular for a population like that. The 215 is aimed squarely at emerging markets like that.
The world is so much bigger than our own experience. The 215 isn’t really a phone aimed at people like yourself.
29 days of *standby* time is nothing to write home about, that’s how every other phone is spec’ed out.
The problem is that’s the one spec every manufacturer lies about – even in plane mode, no one would be able to reach it – and I seriously doubt Nokia raised above the crowd on this one.
Prior to the Microsoft takeover, I had a Nokia 2G phone. Actually, I’ve had several. And I had nothing but praise for those phones. True, they didn’t have 3G capabilities, but they had one-week battery life, and lasted years without a hiccup.
The last Nokia phone that I purchased (which was after Microsoft took over) claimed something like a 37-day battery life in standby mode. In fact, it was about 37 hours when set in 2G mode. When set in 3G, it was more like 12 hours. Fortunately, I was able to return the phone, as our local law (here in Taiwan) requires that vendors give us 7 days to decide if we want to keep or return electronic devices.
I replaced the Microsoft phone with a Samsung, which has been good.
Of course, I’m sure that Microsoft wouldn’t be lying about the battery life of their phones. After all, if you can’t trust Microsoft, who can you trust?
Edited 2015-01-06 23:46 UTC
My old Nokia C3-00’s battery used to last almost a month.
My Nokia 6600 was recharged once a week when it was 3 years old. When it was new I recharged it every other week. Even the Nokia N9 smartphone can last a week in battery saving mode.
I think you are trolling.
I wish they would have added only a few more features to this phone. If they had, it would have been perfect for me. The only things I look for from a phone is the ability to make calls, text (so a full keyboard would have been nice), do turn-by-turn GPS, and occasionally check out a website. For these features, I’d be willing to go up to $100 for the phone. I already have an 8″ tablet for everything else, so why have 2 devices that do exactly the same thing?
For the features it offers, this phone is actually a little expensive, in my opinion. I’ve had a Google Galaxy Nexus for over 2 years, and even thought it works perfectly, I would like to find a simpler replacement in the foreseeable future.
I seriously considered this phone, but without GPS and 3G (needed for most online GPS software) this phone is useless to me.
And if you’re going to say this phone is not for me, then who is it for? People keep saying “emerging markets”, but have any of you every been to a so called “emerging market” like Brazil or India? Well, I’m originally from Brazil and know a few people from India and people there don’t want these phones either. At least, not when you can get an off-brand Chinese Android phone for $70 US dollars in Paraguay! I imagine it would be even cheaper in India. Oh, and that Chinese phone can do those things I mentioned above as “must haves” for me.
The 215 is intended for emerging countries in Asia, Africa, and the like. I have been to part of India where even the cheapest android phone is too expensive. This phone will probably have the most traction in parts of Africa. $100 would be far far too high in those countries, and turn by turn data would be spotty if available at all.
While the 215 is going to be released in at least some places in Europe, there don’t seem to be plans for it to be released in the US at all.
Edited 2015-01-07 04:33 UTC
If they’re trying to reach the low-end market in India, they’ll need to support five or six Indian scripts at the very least. Unless S30 has been radically overhauled, this phone is not going to have anything like that level of support. I guess it might do better in Africa.
Microsoft’s website says that this phone will only be released in a dual-band GSM version, which means it won’t even work in the US.
Because they don’t have several scripts? Guess someone needs a linguistic update…
Not at all – it might do better in Africa because there are countries in Africa where the Latin script is used to write the main local languages. In these countries, there might be a market for a low-end internet-enabled phone even if it only supports text entry in the Latin script. It goes without saying that the phone is not likely to gain much traction in African countries whose languages mainly use non-Latin scripts.
Although there are plenty of languages in Africa that use a script based on the Latin alphabet, these typically use characters like 'Eoe and 'E” and diacritics marking tone, amongst other differences with English. So such a phone must have proper Unicode support anyway.
I was thinking specifically of southern African languages, many of which have simpler orthographies and diacritics that are mostly supported by the standard set. There are plenty of these with tens of millions of speakers between them – Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Swazi, Bemba, etc. Languages like Lingala and Kikuyu are obviously going to need better script support than S30 provides. Anyway, this discussion is getting a bit pointless now, so you can have the last word if you want.
Fair enough, that also goes for Eastern African languages.
So I contacted some people I know in India, some of which regularly visit very remote areas of the country and what they told me was rather interesting:
My and large low end phones used in those areas don’t use localized scripts, or hindi for that matter. Localized scripts don’t seem to be much of an issue.
When it is, people tend to use a third party app like Panini Keypad: http://paninikeypad.com/index1.php
Now this is anecdotal, but from everything I can tell the issue you bring up isn’t a major factor. Do you have data about the requirement for multiple script support in india?
What I have is anecdotal as well, but seeing as my parents still live in one of these ‘remote areas’, as your acquaintances called them, it’s perhaps a bit more firsthand.
Around five years ago, most people with mobile phones in the village where my parents live had relatively basic Nokias or something similar. They used them almost exclusively to make calls. Services providers used to send out SMSs in Tamil transliterated into the Latin script. Many people had to ask their children to read these messages out to them: although most adults are literate, quite a few of them are only literate in the Tamil script.
Then Indian brands, and a few Asian brands like Samsung, began localising quite heavily. You began getting devices which supported data entry in Tamil. Many of these simply used the Panini Keypad, but they integrated it quite well at a system level. Things changed pretty dramatically. Most people have advanced featurephones or smartphones – though battery life can be an issue when the power supply can be erratic. They use Whatsapp and Facebook quite heavily, all in Tamil. There’s plenty of choice when it comes to buying phones which support Tamil out of the box. It’s only when you start getting to mid-level smartphones that this changes. I don’t see any reason why people would be interested in a phone that made them jump through a number of hoops to get what other phones give them out of the box. Local manufacturers, at least, seem to think it matters.
Maybe things in Hindi-speaking areas are different – literacy rates are considerably lower there, so reading and being able to type may not be so much of an issue. On the other hand, one would expect an internet-oriented phone to be primarily targeted at a literate audience.
Have a look back at http://www.osnews.com/story/28118/Zuckerberg_slams_Tim_Cook or better still the less-provocatively named underlying article at http://time.com/facebook-world-plan/ – you may notice a theme. I don’t think this phone is aimed at people who are currently in the market, or perhaps even considering entering the market for a phone. I’m guessing it’s aimed at those who otherwise would not buy any phone at all.
2G certainly makes it less than ideal in some more developed markets. Australia’s biggest telco is busy trying to get the remaining users off its 2G network, so it can close it in 2016.
4G and 3g are backward compatible. So a 2G phone will still work. [I have a friend who used a Nokia 3210 brick until 2012.]
Edited 2015-01-07 10:11 UTC
I think you’ve got that the wrong way round. 4G and 3G handsets are typically backward compatible with 2G, but for any phone to work as 2G the 2G network must exist. When Telstra shut down their 2G network, their remaining 2G customers will have to migrate to 3G or 4G, migrate to another telco, or lose service.
It might actually be useful, except I have several (Mot C168) sans the internet nonsense that you would need a data plan.
I have a Verizon LG Glance (VX7100?) with extended battery that goes a month when on, hours and hours of talk-time, boots in under 5 seconds, etc. It’s great as a phone.
I have a 4g hotspot for internet.
Nokia 215 has preinstalled Facebook and Messenger with instant notification
Perhaps Thom can say if ‘PreInstalled’ also means that you can’t get rid of them.
That makes it just about unusable IMHO.
These will use Battery even if you don’t want them to.
This was one of the reasons I stopped using my HTC and Samsung Android phones.
Preinstalled doesn’t mean running in the background 24/7. Considering the markets this phone is intended for, there is no reason to assume it is going to be constantly connected.
It’s not clear to me whether or not it can sync a (google) calendar or two. In fact, that would be all I really need from a work phone, and I’d gladly use a rather ‘dumb’ phone all day and switch to a smart one in the evening.
Well, seems like it doesn’t sync calendars. Too bad.
Does anyone know of a brand of dumbphone which can do just that (sync with multiple google calendars)?
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Does it come with snake?
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