Nokia 2.3: HMD flings out €109 budget 'droid with a 2-day battery HMD Global, the licencee of the once-ubiquitous Nokia mobile phone brand, today unveiled its latest budget blower, the Nokia 2.3. This handset resembles a heavily upgraded version of the Nokia 2.2. It carries the same MediaTek Helio A22 chipset, but has improvements in other areas. The rear-facing camera, for instance, is now …
Slow compared to what? Other budget phones of the same price or phones that are 5x or more expensive?
I have a Nokia 5.1 which has Android one and a Mediatek chipset and not noticed any slowness myself, and its used as my daily driver and cost me a little more than the Nokia 2.3, I paid £120 about 6 months ago for it.
I have a 7.1 and man, what a blast. Does everything, has 2 days of battery life, dual-sim etc ...
"HMD Global bought the rights to the Nokia marque in 2016, following the disastrous acquisition of the Finnish tech giant's handset division by Microsoft in 2014. Since then, the reborn Nokia lineup has won some new fans, thanks to a diverse lineup of solid budget devices and quirky high-enders."
This, I didn't know, but clearly, those guys know which market to go after, and this is the right one: top medium entry phones. My 7.1 costed me 250 E only ...
Apple now know insane prices are a matter of the past. The market is clearly in mid-range ...
I've used several Nokia phones during app testing and you'd be better off with a Huawei or any other recent phone in my testing pool. Terrible app startup times... terrible app performance... They are comparable to cheap LG phones from 4 or 5 years ago.
But then I suppose if you paid £120 you got what you paid for.
I will give you removable batteries and even 3.5mm jacks now in-ear BT headsets are halfway decent and not too expensive, but my removable SD card with the entire photo library that is none of Google's business - I don't put my family in the cloud - is a prise out of cold dead hands item.
Should I visit somewhere that ignores the GDPR, I can take my phone and leave my personal stuff behind. This is a Good Thing.
"I will give you ... 3.5mm jacks now in-ear BT headsets are halfway decent and not too expensive"
I have some *very* nice in-ear and over-ear headphones that I'd like to use. I don't see the need for buying *another* set of headphones when I've got 3 already ;)
Not sure what's strange about not wanting to throw a device away just because the battery is dead, but I regret to tell you that according to HMD/Nokia the battery is NOT removable.
I have unexpectedly found that I quite like the convenience of being able to use my phone to pay for low-value things, rather than carry around a separate card, so the lack of NFC is an issue: I'd rather they'd ditched the redundant charger and cable. Fix those and, apart from being far too large (as practically all phones are these days), it would be pretty much all I would need in a phone.
Not sure what's strange about not wanting to throw a device away just because the battery is dead,
Throwing away a device because tools and a few minutes are required to change a battery is pretty strange.
Non replaceable and non user replaceable are completely different things, especially as the latter is usually a simple 5 minute job.
For those people strangely obsessed with removable batteries and SD card slots - this has them...
Sadly, no. It says "Non-removable" on Nokia's site.
It does have an SD card slot, as well as 2GB RAM and 32GB Flash built-in (just about the minimum that's useful, these days, and the article might have mentioned it) though the website doesn't say whether the dual-SIM version forces you to choose between a second SIM and an SD card as is so often the case.
The phone also does not have NFC, which is finally becoming almost useful enough to be a requirement.
While USB type C is newer and gaining in popularity, I've seen plenty of things sold in 2019 which still use the micro USB connection. Orientation has never been particularly important to me, and I have a wonderfully large collection of micro USB cables, so it's not very important to me which of those two ports they choose to use. In fact, if I was pressed to make a choice, I might have to go with micro USB only because there are a few different types of USB type C cables that can't easily be told apart from a look at the connectors.
I see the website says "AI-assisted 2-day battery life". It's as if they want to regain the top spot on https://dontkillmyapp.com/
(If it wasn't for the info on that website I would have ditched my Nokia 6.1 work properly. When I set an alarm to wake me up in the morning I expect it to bloody work! Stupid app-killing aside, it's a good phone.)
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