Ten... dirt-cheap voice phones World+Dog may be falling in love with smartphones faster than a large lass on a date with George Clooney, but there is still a place for the cheap and cheerful voice-centric handset. To start with, basic phones shorn of the extravagances of 3G, GPS, Wi-Fi, football pitch-sized hi-res screens and always-on connectivity can …
I just gave up on my run of 5 smartphones and put my SIM back in my old neglected 6310i.
Oh my its like coming back home. It switches on in about 3 seconds. The battery lasts forever. Most features are just a responsive click or two away. Call quality and signal reception are fantastic.
The build quality is truly stunning. Its a quantum leap forward.
The peak of mobile phone perfection was reached in 2002. Its been downhill since then.
Throw away that piece of junk that cost you £400+ and get a proper adults phone.
I gave my mum my old 6310i and just this year she got suckered into an exchange for a smaller more colourful phone when looking for a new contract.
Of course Carphone Warehouse (or whoever it was) were more than happy to take it off her hands as a part exchange. I told her afterwards that second to keeping the 6310i, they should have paid her for it AND gave her the new phone AND paid her contract for 6 months.
I've had troubles hearing her clearly on the new shiny Nokia phone ever since.
.
And Nokia wonder why they're losing market share so rapidly.
Despite years of playing with the latest cheapo smart phones, O2 XDA, HTC TyTN II, iphone, I always kept my nokia 6210,
Yes, ok, it’s got a crack on the screen, so what??
I hit any button, and the screen lights up, dial a number,
(Or use 2 clicks to get the phonebook up, find the number and dial it.),
Talk, listen, hang up, job done.
Or use 1 click, type in a sms, and then send it,
No frills, no thrills, no satnav, no decent games, no mp3s, no mobile internet, no battery life measured in hours instead of weeks.
My area manager is better, he gets his phones from work, all the other bosses get the latest toys, and he keeps his 6310i despite the pleas of his bosses, to upgrade, for just this reason, the nokia 6 series, "just works".....
I got to get me a 6310i though, Bluetooth is much better than using a db9 data cable.
<Cough> logos and ring tones, db9 cable, logo manager, 6210, instant job security…… <cough>
One of the best around. I recall when Navikey came out - truly inspired concept. My first phone on contract was a 2210, kept that until the 6110 came out - though when we moved country a few years ago, the missus decided to give it to her gran (ack). I believe the missus grandma still uses it to this day.
What I'd really like is a cheap phone with just two features: voice calls and Wifi tethering. Then I could ditch the £499 iPhone and £529 iPad 3G, and replace them with their cheaper siblings, the £189 iPod Touch and/or £429 iPad Wifi.
Before you start shouting Mifi, I don't want a second monthly contract and yet another charger to lug around.
I just had a spiro, but took it back after two days. The plasitic is closer to playdo in quality, and the voices on the other end might as well be coming from the other side via weegy board for sound quality. If you only buy a phone for voice, then it should at least be able to do that.
I liked the change to a simple charger output and a 3.5 jack, but the so called usb port doesnt connect to anything Ive ever seen. For £10 more the zygo (with £10 rebate on the PAYG sim) is a far better quality product
There's something very appealing about a phone that fits in the 'change' pocket in a pair of jeans, a pocket so damn small actually fishing coins out is near impossible. I'd say it's an essential tick box on any review.
...because some days the smartphone and manbag is just too much to carry
I have an OT-808, the flipphone variant of the OT-800; it cost me 35 quid off Ebay unlocked, and is actually a pretty nice device. Closed, it's tiny, about five centimetres square, although it does have a shiny pink exterior (apparently it was explicitly designed to look like a powder compact). It fits in my pocket beautifully. The UI is surprisingly configurable with both a widget-based home screen and much simpler traditional one.
There's a decent selection of functionality, although mostly farmed out to bundled J2ME apps for stuff like Twitter (which I haven't tried using yet). The email app is native but it won't talk to my Dovecot IMAP server. There's a reasonable calendar app, which allegedly syncs to a remote server, but there's no documentation anywhere on what the protocol is. The J2ME engine is IBM's and is relatively decent but a lot of apps (including MidpSSH, alas) get confused by the full keyboard, as they expect a phone keypad instead.
Bluetooth BROWSE is *not* supported, so the only way of getting files onto and off the thing is via Bluetooth PUSH or mass storage --- you can't access the file system remotely.
One irritating design flaw is that there's an exterior button that starts the music player that you can't disable, so I have on occasion stuffed the phone into my pocket and had it started playing. Still, better than my old phone, a crappy Motorola PEBL which had exterior buttons that would randomly reprogram the ring tone every time I pocketed it (including to silent!).
Disturbingly, when I received it, the internal memory was full of pictures of Richard Hammond.
"The only slight drawback is the screen. Read too many texts on a 1.5in, 128 x 128 screen and your optician will think you have been practicing on the pink oboe too often."
My understanding of what playing the pink oboe is is obviously somewhat different to yours, and I've never heard anyone say my definition of it will make your eyes weak.
I got a ZTE 102 on 3 for £20, it seems to do everything a phone should do and the battery easily lasts a week. It's small and light, looks better that a £20 has any right to.
I haven't used it much because 4 days after I got it. Orange launched the (rebranded ZTE) San Francisco Android phone for £99, which is the best budget smart phone by several country miles.
My wife has had a Spiro for a few months and she has to charge it every other day. She suspects that it's the screen lighting-up frequently when it's in her handbag that drains the battery. She has the keylock activated but of course the display comes on whenever any button is pressed.
after the Register coverage of the Orange San Francisco phone (aka 'ZTE blade') I popped out
and picked one up (for playing with...) 89 quid with mandatory 10 quid top-up (I think its 99 quid with 20 quid topup now...)
it lasts for over 5 days from a single charge when used as a enhanced phone (ie dont run data apps etc). thats actually not that bad!
Go figure, I need a simple GSM phone that supports 4 bands and does not sport a camera. Your list is just more proof that simple phones automatically get either half-baked selective band support or some crap camera. When did we stop associating phones with simple voice communication devices?
PH because she is the only one that cares whether her phone can access social networking sites.
I went to CW to look for the advertised 99p Alcatel OT 209.
Strangely its more in the shop, even allowing for there being no p+p and the £10 credit deal is only if you pay (for a pay and go) on a card. Cash requires double the amount of credit to be bought. Other "cheap phones" are similarly more in the real world
Is this some strangely deluded "anti-anonymity" measure (either for governmental security or corporate future marketing purposes) or have I missed something else? It doesnt seem like a bait and switch scam, but then I suppose if it was one, it wouldn't if they could manage it.
It's all to do with box breaking, where a phone is bought to be sold on abroad. Obviously these phones are subsidised by the carriers/dealers, and to recoup their money they need them to be topped-up and used. They seem to have found most box-breakers are none to keen to hand over their plastic.
On another note, the articles claims the Nokia 2330 Classic and 2220 Slide are the same, they are not. The 2220 doesn't have bluetooth!
I suppose this might be as good a place to ask as any, does anyone know of any handset of any age which does the following:
1) Loud (being on-call means the beeping needs to wake me up)
2) Possible to answer calls by voice - so I can just say 'answer' or whatever at it, and it'll answer in speakerphone mode.
3) Sends and receives calls and SMS messages
That's really all I want, can I find a phone that does it? Not so far :/
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