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MWC: First Impressions – Nokia’s raver phone

Alex Walls
February 26, 2013

Yes you read that heading correctly, Nokia has created a raver phone. Well, that was my impression anyhow.

Day One saw few highlights, but the Nokia booth comes close. For the longest time the Finnish (former) giant has been surviving off its feature phones business while it waits for its top shelf Nokia Lumia range to take off (running Windows Phone, an eco-system that has yet to get any legs).

Samsung, ZTE and Huawei have all squeezed this market and Nokia has responded in style. Borrowing the design aesthetic from the Lumia range, it has been applied to its ‘Insert Numeral Here’ range.

Nokia 105 for ‚¬15 – rave it up

The most impressive on stand was the ‚¬15 ( £13) Nokia 105. This looks like a redesigned 3510 from a decade ago, but has the same bright plastic unibody seen on its Lumia brethren. Why should you care? Because this is the first ‘disposable’ phone I’ve seen that is worth a purchase.

You get a hell of a lot of phone for ‚¬15, a snazzy design, a basic OS (S30 – but it does the basics well – including games and browsing), but, most importantly, the keyboard is waterproof.

While Nokia rep Ray Haddow assured me that the device is focused on emerging markets (China, Africa, India) the suggestion that it could find its legs in the first world didn’t go unwelcomed.

Basically, for anyone looking to go backpacking or to music festivals this summer should go pick one up. It will survive the mud bog to an extent, and if it doesn’t? ‚¬15. No smashed iPhone worries here.

Best of all, Nokia claims a ridiculous month of standby time, and 2-3 days of normal usage (Haddow claims 12h straight talking time).

He did laugh at my suggestion that it’s a raver phone (sweaty bodies, wet fields – it’ll survive that…) but did suggest a possible marketing tie in in the future (buy a 720, get a 105, for example).

Well done Nokia – proof that there’s life in the feature phone market – even if I did all your market research for you.

Addendum:

There were some new Lumia 720s and 520s also launched – read here.

The slightly upscaled XXX model, the 301, was also launched – more and better – it runs 3.5G, has a better browser, Facebook integration, a much better camera and a ‚¬65 price tag.

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