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Microsoft Unveils Nokia 215, a $29 Phone With Internet Access
An anonymous reader sends word of the Nokia 215, Microsoft's $29 internet-ready phone. "Smartphones may be more affordable than ever, but, for quite a few people, they are still too expensive. And they offer short battery life, pretty much across the board. It is not a winning combination, especially for those living in developing markets, looking to be connected to the Internet while on the go. Enter Nokia 215, a dirt-cheap Internet-ready phone, which Microsoft announced earlier today. It packs some of the most-important features people want in a smartphone, but without any of the major drawbacks. The software giant calls it its "most affordable Internet-ready entry-level phone yet", costing just $29."
But I find this pretty awesome.
April's fools day arrived early this year.
oh slashdot, how far you have fallen.
Here is what else you should know about Nokia 215. It has a 2.4-inch display, 0.3 MP camera on the back (which can shoot video), 8 MB of RAM (that is not a typo)
Well that's one way to keep Android from being ported to it...
I don't want one any more, but was a time when this would have been right up my alley. I use my phone for a lot of browsing these days, so it's right out. But a lot of people have been asking for a phone exactly like this; it has the uSD slot so it can be used as an MP3 player, which is where most cheap phones fail.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Looks like their last cheap phone for kids, with a layout change.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
bzzzzzt.
Thanks for playing, Microsoft. File this on with the Zune
It has WINDOWS!!! That's the biggest drawback!
"It packs some of the most-important features people want in a smartphone, but without any of the major drawbacks"
Except I read elsewhere that it lacks 3G support, so internet would be barely usable.
They announce this just in time for it to be completely swamped by the extra sexy gear that will be announced at the CES. As great as this may be, now is not the time to announce anything that is both practical and pedestrian. We see that Microsoft's marketing department has been untouched by its new CEO.
So, what's the news? I think it's a revamped Nokia 107 or Nokia phone using S30 operating system...
I don't get "smartphones are too expensive." Fifteen years ago people paid $1,000 or more out of pocket just to connect a desktop to the Internet. Today, you can buy a new Android smartphone for $50-60 or 8" Android tablet for the same money. Even if you pay the Apple tax, you're still paying just half what you had to ten years ago to get an ultra-portable, Internet-enabled device.
Furthermore, phone plans with plenty of (non-video, non-streaming) Internet access can be found for something like $25/month from places like Virgin Mobile. (I just moved my wife and kids to one of their shared plans...still only pay about $40 a month for all of them.) If you want more, you still can probably get all the bandwidth you need for less than $100/month. (Again, cheap for those of us who remember agonizing over corporate T1 lines.)
Unless the Nokia 215 is aiming to be the next Obamaphone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpAOwJvTOio)...what exactly is the point of this?
This Christmas I picked up a few LG Realm's for the kids for $20 each. This is a full-fledged Android smartphone (dual-core, etc), not some entry-level crap.
Root it, hack in a hardware break-out & use it as multiple slave devices, using a Raspberry Pi (or other board) as the brains; :P )
Use the phone's battery, display, other interfaces, as Raspi peripherals. (Yes, the execution of this plan might be a bit tricky
Near as I can determine, the only thing about this that I'd consider "news" here is that Microsoft is pushing a Yet Another Feature Phone rather than building a cheap Windows-based smartphone.
I feel like there should be more to the story. Is there some background, or just a press release and some specs?
Log in or piss off.
Does it include snake. That is all I need to know.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Now they're throwing away phones at $29 a pop because you can't compete with the $800 iPhone 6's and $800 Samsung Notes.
Sad... not wait.... good! Karma and all, Microsoft have had a decade of making seriously crap overpriced buggy products and that they've fallen to a Walmart discounter level.
It reminds me of the time I saw IBM's Via Voice in a PC World discount bin for a pound, and nobody wanted it.
Well the problem is that we still need a $1000 PC. The $600 phone doesn't replace it. Also, $100/month is very expensive. Over 5 years, it's $6000.
There are already $30 Firefox OS touchscreen phones available, with a full HTML5 web experience. Why would someone looking for cheap internet access buy this?
So what if it's $29. It's worthless without a data plan, which I haven't seen any mention of. The price and quality of the data plan is more important. And hearing it's likely 2g makes it nearly useless for most people.
Seriously? This is a device not unlike the Nokia 108 RM-945, both of which seem designed to suck payments at the teets of the GSM-provider/subsidizer. You can transfer your data using SD-cards or GSM; that's it. Neither of which offer wifi. If you're not including wifi on the device, who is paying for/subsidizing the 'internet', really? And how?
Does anyone remember WAP? This is like Facebook (etc.) subsidized WAP for developing nations, in modern times. Thank you %$#@! rich bastard Zuck & Co. This not exactly open-access internet for developing nations. Do not be fooled. Do not be their tool.
This is also a form of 'bundling', and is not to be confused with a voip-friendly phone, (except for those hackers choosing to abuse this subsidized cost structure using a call-back sytem using lower rates in the EU-type GSM cost structures [...US is subscriber+caller-based. Not a strictly caller-based costing structure])
This is classic Nokia evolution and engineering, now owned by Microsoft and being transitioned for the developing world using an advertising-based payment structure.
Happy 2015+.
With most people burning $50 plus on their monthly plans I doubt this would fly in most of the US as anything except a cheap "free phone" you got for signing up for your plan. It would be nice if some of the cut rate plans sold them though. I use Page Plus and it is a bit annoying having to buy an $80 older Verizon phone when I only need a single $25 refill every 3-4 months.
It's a $30 phone without any subsidies and you're bitching that it lacks fancy features? You do realize that there are lots of people who don't actually need maps/navigation on their phone right? Hell I have a current generation iPhone and I very rarely use it for navigation since my car has a GPS built in.
There is a very sizeable market for basic phones with basic features at a low price. Nokia has been serving this market successfully for many years now.
Perhaps this is amazing in the US, but cheap phones have been on sale for a long time. A Nokia 220 (presumably a step up from the 215) retails for £25 in the UK. A tenner more and you can have an Android handset.
True, inflation has happened since 1977 when Hustle , the first implementation of Snake that I'm aware of, was released, and $.25 per play has become $1 per play (source). But Hustle at least offered more than 1 target per credit.
I don't get "smartphones are too expensive."
What about it is confusing? They ARE expensive, at least to anyone with some appreciation of the value of a dollar.
Fifteen years ago people paid $1,000 or more out of pocket just to connect a desktop to the Internet.
Just because things are cheaper than they used to be doesn't mean everyone can afford them. Nor does it mean that you are necessarily getting good value for money.
Furthermore, phone plans with plenty of (non-video, non-streaming) Internet access can be found for something like $25/month from places like Virgin Mobile.
$25/month to a lot of people can mean the difference between being able to pay rent or not. I think you have very little idea what it actually means to be poor.
At the risk of posting the obvious, this is not a Windows phone, it's just a slightly different price point in Nokia's previously existing line of low end feature phones. Probably running Series 40. (TFM says "Series 30+" whatever that means.)
In other words, it has roughly the capabilities of 2003 smartphones, where you could go out and buy a paper faster than you could display a list of local movies on the phone.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You can pull the SD card out of the phone and plug it into any SD writer that supports high-speed USB. This will work so long as your SD card uses a well-known file system (FAT, NTFS, or UDF), and given the Microsoft branding it'll probably be FAT.
i wana buy two~!!
It figures, not an android, and not a winphone...so back to Asha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Asha_platform)?
The phones with mini browsers (WAP) and email clients were available for many years...so this is not really a "smart" phone (as in a phone with 1000s of apps).
BTW, since "Nokia Lumia" is now "Microsoft Lumia", the low end phones are now "Nokia" do they gettinh ready to span "Nokia" out of M$?
4wdloop
There is a very sizeable market for basic phones with basic features at a low price. Nokia has been serving this market successfully for many years now.
Sizable market?
I suppose this is why Nokia *didn't* go practically bankrupt, and have to sell itself to Microsoft. Oh wait, it did.
Having a sizable market that wants something, and having that market be able to afford to pay for that something are two different things. The average monthly wage in that "sizable market" won't allow the purchase of the device in numbers to make it sufficiently profitable, or Nokia would not have found itself in trouble in the first place.
To paraphrase Feynman, the situation is not as symmetrical as it first appears.
That's for certain because it's 2g only. AT&T is shutting down its 2g service by the end of 2016.
I looked at cheap candy bar phones, but none seemed to support 3g. Some more expensive phones like the Nokia Asha (~$80) supported it, but there were Android smartphones at a similar price point.
verizon wants a 2 year recommit to replace a 5-6 yr old *flip phone* for $80+tax. would much rather pay $30 outright for something like this and skip the contract renewal... and OMG it has real buttons!!!!!
Too bad Microsoft believed it needed to emulate Apple so completely. The previous generation of WinCE devices was not technically the most impressive platform yet at least it was open.
Inability to maintain local address books, inability to use GPS for local applications without leaking to MS servers, all execution locked down to app stores, non-removable batteries, no SD cards in high end models and no ability to replace the metro shell with something not ugly as shit means it is not possible to even consider using or contributing in any way to their mobile platform.
Even today the platform lacks standard features having been around for years in other platforms including earlier versions of windows mobile.
If Microsoft were able to get over themselves and stop being control freaks, lay off the unnecessary cloud bullshit, take privacy seriously and stop locking shit down it could become a formidable and well-liked platform.
The underlying technology itself is quite good and well executed... their politics are fucking it all up.
There have been lots of these cheap feature phones for years. You can find many models in developing countries already, with an FOB cost of around $14. In fact, this type of phone is already old and out-dated. The market for them is almost dead, even in India. This just shows how clueless M$ is about pretty much everything in the universe.
It's great to hear iOS and Android fan club members deciding for me what market I'm in. There will always be a market segment with highly skilled techies / hackers who prefer to carry around a phone that has superior battery life and superior quality calls as opposed to one that is running a platform highly targeted by malicious parties for its ease of hackability. All that ram and storage is a great place to hide things. It's a much more difficult proposition to carry out the types of attacks seen today on modern smartphones on a phone such as the Nokia 215. I am so glad Microsoft has been willing to continue produce the series 40/30 line of feature phones. Keep it up
Has been around for at least a year. I can get an Android 4.1 phone on dhgate for $25, I just have to buy ten of them.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
That's what I was wondering as well - how does Microsoft get to use the name Nokia, when they are branding the Lumia as 'Microsoft Lumia'?
Methinks they could start w/ a Lumia 520, strip it down a bit, put WP 8.0 (not 8.1) on it, and aim it at the market in question.
There's not much 2G infrastructure left in the US, and the carriers are migrating people off it as fast as they can, so they can recycle the spectrum for 4G, which is a lot more spectrum-efficient as well as offering higher speeds. Otherwise, I'd be really happy to get one of these to be the spare phone that sits in my wife's car for emergencies. (The battery life is a big part of the appeal here.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
for two times the price one can get a Huawei Y330, which is a phone orders of magnitude better than this pile of sh*t.
There is a hidden price for using a MS Phone: your friends will laugh at you for using Windows Phone.
for two times the price one can get a Huawei Y330, which is a phone orders of magnitude better than this pile of sh*t.
Many thanks for today's message from the Glorious People's Republic of China PR section.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Buying a phone is not the burden, paying excessive amounts of money each month for a data plan is the big hindrance to expanding mobile everywhere. Drop the price for data plans and many more will consider a smartphone.