There are a lot of people who have a smartphone these days. Even a good number of older people who don’t know the first thing about computers might use a smartphone. Still, despite their popularity, there still plenty of people who use those old-fashioned handsets.
One of the most popular of these type handsets is the Nokia 105. This phone is especially popular in European countries, but also has gets a pretty high demand in Asia and Africa. In fact, it’s so popular that it might surprise you to hear the rate in which the handset is sold. Having sold over 100 million since 2013, it sells at over 100 per minute — that’s almost 2 phones sold every second.
Microsoft has redesigned the handset to “take all the qualities of a Lumia and build them into the Nokia 105,” according to Peter Griffith who works at the London Design Lab as head of Microsoft Phones Design. Griffith continues:
“And we wanted to combine that with things like this astonishing battery life and the torchlight that we knew were relevant to people in emerging economies. The big challenge was, could we hit the $20 price point without compromising on quality?”
The handset is a very basic phone, and that’s about all it’s meant to be. It only has very basic dialing buttons and a 4-directional d-pad. It doesn’t even have a volume rocker at all. It has a few basic built in tools such as a calculator, calendar, and stopwatch, and maybe a couple games, but that’s about all anyone will get. It does have a flashlight though.
What’s really interesting about this handset is it’s really long battery life. It can last almost thirty-five days in standby mode. This makes it great as a backup phone for when your main phone runs out of battery.
So what do you think about this phone? Do you think it would be useful to you? Do you think it would be worth $20? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
