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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.
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.
It has WINDOWS!!! That's the biggest drawback!
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 $100/month. (Again, cheap for those of us who remember agonizing over corporate T1 lines.)
Unless the Nokia 215 is aiming to be the next Obamaphone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpAOwJvTOio)...what exactly is the point of this?
It would be an ad if /. community would be the target audience. I don't know for you, but I doubt many here will bought such a low tech cellphone. On the other hand, for MS to be able to deliver a basic smartphone under the 30$ is an impressive feat.
Elok
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.
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+.
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.
Well the problem is that we still need a $1000 PC. The $600 phone doesn't replace it.
Theoretically it shouldn't, I agree. But in practice, Anonymous Coward wrote: "plus I no longer have "open" computers they can play with".
Also, $100/month is very expensive. Over 5 years, it's $6000.
How much do rent, food, and power cost over the same time period?
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.
Not really impressive, there are already loads of phones beteween $30 and $50 USD being sold in Asia, most running stripped down versions of android. They may recapture some of the audience from back when Nokia was considered a leading brand, but this segment of the market is already flooded with 'China Phones', most offer better features as well.
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.
No, this phone is basically a GPRS enabled camera -all the processing and storage will be happening in the (Microsoft) cloud. As there are digital cameras in this price range this phone is actually possible.
What? A 0.3 Megapixel, Internet-connected camera? I think not.
These types of phones do not require a data-connected phone plan to work. If you take pictures on the phone, they will save to the micro-SD memory card that you install. Then you simply plug in the micro-USB cable to your computer and copy the picture files (which are saved in JPEG format). There is no cloud involved.
There are a lot of different models of feature phones from Nokia, and not a single one of them works in the way that you suggest. They are designed so that they work in countries that don't have a mobile Internet infrastructure.
The $30 Firefox phone is a failure. It needed twice the RAM to function somewhat properly. Buying it would be a mistake, like cheap ass ARM netbooks with Windows CE that were available a few years ago.
It figures, not an android, and not a winphone...so back to Asha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Asha_platform)?
The phones with mini browsers (WAP) and email clients were available for many years...so this is not really a "smart" phone (as in a phone with 1000s of apps).
BTW, since "Nokia Lumia" is now "Microsoft Lumia", the low end phones are now "Nokia" do they gettinh ready to span "Nokia" out of M$?
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.
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.
Or just go get any number of cheap $20 flip phones from a grocery store and buy a prepay card ...
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
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.