Novelty flip phone strips out almost every feature possible to be as boring as possible

Those who find modern smartphones too distracting from real life might be interested in the Boring Phone (no relation to the smartphone of the same name), a novelty flip phone based on HMD's Nokia 2660 Flip. The Boring Phone was born out of a collaboration between Bodega and Heineken (yes, the beer company) and aims to provide …

[Anonymous Coward]

Boring is good.

No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just a regular smartphone without:

- any AI cruft at all

- any pre-installed/uninstallabe apps from MS, Google, Samsung,

- no 3rd party cruft

I would also like my Google account to merely act as the key to the playstore, and not muscle that gmail address into my contacts, mail, calendar and everywhere else it can.

(True story, my wife missed a moths worth of emails, as for some reason her phones mail app decided to only show the gmail inbox. Despite being configured not to twice).

[AMBxx]

Re: Boring is good.

Boring phone would be fine if it was just made possible to share the 5G connection over wifi or bluetooth. That would give me everything I need.

[Martin an gof]

Re: Boring is good.

The KaiOS-based Nokia flip phone (and the slider, and the candybar version of the same thing) was 4G and could share that by WiFi quite well.

KaiOS on the other hand - and the build quality of the phone itself - not so brilliant (yes, we did have one).

M.

[Jet Set Willy]

Re: Boring is good.

K-9 Mail client is your friend.

Export settings and then reimport if they get lost (although that's never happened to me). The only thing you will need to remember is email account passwords.

[hoola]

Re: Boring is good.

How many remember the Motorola V3?

It was indestructible, worked, had a great screen and keypad you could use.

[W.S.Gosset]

Re: Boring is good.

Samsung a800 for me.

Matchbox-sized: I carried it in my jeans' fob pocket. 5-7 days' battery life. Human-centric software&hardware design&integration.

A very nice feature was user-created addressbook Groups, to which you could assign different ringtones. So you could assess urgency/importance of call as soon as it rang. Expecting a major call? Shift the Contact into Override group so you're alerted immediately. Or have all Groups set to Silent overnight except Family. Etc

[Frank Bitterlich]

Re: Boring is good.

Remember the GPO Type 746? They didn't make any decent phones after that any more. DTMF was a step in the wrong direction already.

[W.S.Gosset]

Re: Boring is good.

Nifty little 43sec video:

Evolution of the Telephone

Some real groovers in the 50s & 60s.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Boring is good.

I want a physical QWERTY keyboard, like the slider-phones used to offer. That's the big one for me. Aside from that, SMS and phone are the must-haves. Bluetooth is useful only because I still have a car that treats a Bluetooth-paired phone only as a phone; I won't ever pair a phone with a car that has a more-ambitious irritainment system (Android Auto, etc), and I could do without it. (After all, for most of my driving career I couldn't receive calls while in the car, and I only get a couple a year as it is. I'd be perfectly happy letting them go to voicemail.)

GPS is useful, but there are alternatives for that. Maps, for example.

Having a camera is nice, but again if I didn't have it, it wouldn't be a big loss.

The browser on the phone I use mostly to look things up while doing the crossword. Again, dispensable.

But I really, really don't want to go back to responding to texts with T9.

[Tom Chiverton 1]

Some of the shoddiest date validation I've ever seen on that site.

[Robin]

Well spotted! I managed to enter 31st September and get a .Net runtime error page.

[wolfetone]

Don't Drink & Code kids.

[DS999]

Don't Drink & Code kids.

Surely drinking on the job is one of the benefits of working for Heineken?

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Only if you consider drinking Heineken to be a benefit for some reason...

[wolfetone]

It'd be better than Carling.

Then again my own warm piss is better than Carling.

[cookieMonster]

Anyone’s warm piss is better than Carling

[DS999]

For most employers

Drinking any beer on the job would be better than working sober

[Pascal Monett]

Bummer

Just when I read a title that tells me : this is my phone for when I retire, the rest of the article says I won't get it.

Grrr.

[nematoad]

Re: Bummer

Yes, it's a real shame that this 'phone won't be for sale.

I'm currently looking for a replacement for my el cheapo LG dumb phone. I don't want one of those all singing all dancing efforts that cost and arm and a leg. I just want a 'phone so I can make calls, send texts and nothing else.

Even so that 'phone has a camera? Looks a bit to specced up to me.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Bummer

So....

This phone is a re-skin of the Nokia 2660 Flip, which is available.

Why not buy that? (mind you, it seems a bit over-priced. Tesco sell a basic Alcatel flip phone for less, as well as the Flip and a Doro with similar format).

Also, look at Amazon.

[heyrick]

Re: Bummer

What stood out for me is the 4G support. It seems quite a few of the basic cheapie phones are 2G...which is fine for texts and calls and no frills, but not quite so fine given that 2G is running out of road.

[Michael Strorm]

Re: Bummer

> Doro

Pretty much what I was thinking. Doro and similarly-overpriced phones have been marketed as "no-frills phones for stereotypically technophobic elderly parents et al" for ages now.

This isn't news, it's just a publicity stunt to sell "canoe" beer, and not even an interesting or clever one at that.

[Someone Else]

Re: Bummer

My wife (a confirmed Luddite) wants one! Now. And we're willing to pay for it. I'm sure she will be OK with the logos...

[Intractable Potsherd]

Re: Bummer

Similar here, but for the children. They are getting to the age of more independent activity, but there is no way in this world that they are having smartphones.

[Martin an gof]

Re: Bummer

It seems it isn't the done thing these days but ours didn't get phones at all while they were in primary school, and had dumb phones (for various values of dumb) for the first couple of years of secondary. When smartphones became inevitable, they were not allowed Google accounts, and therefore the Play Store was off limits. It takes a little bit of preparation on our part, but it has reaped some rewards in our opinion. It's also probably better that we are seen to be "trusting" them to an extent by not installing spyware on their phones, however much good that actually does.

Cheap dumb phones are still available, as are cheap data-less (or -lite) contracts. Dumb phones also have the advantage of far better battery life than a typical smartphone meaning that the panic phonecall or "sorry, I'm going to be late" text (which is the real reason we want them to have phones at all) can usually be made.

How on earth did we (that is, our parents) cope before mobile phones?

Planning, that's how, none of this "I'll send you a text when we've decided what to do" stuff...

(should have used an "old fart" icon...)

M.

[lglethal]

One slight thing. What's the point of the camera? I mean you cant look at the pictures on such a screen... So how are you going to know if there crap (they will be) or not... ;)

[Valeyard]

As a (proud) owner of a nokia 2660 I can assure you there is no point at all to the camera, I'd rather it wasn't there

[thames]

The camera would be good for taking pictures of things that you need to make a note of later, like signs or public notices, business cards, hand written notes, or something you saw on a store shelf. It's easier to take a photo of it than to remember to carry a pencil and notepad around for it. The camera and screen are more than good enough for that. I have a phone with equivalent specs to this and the camera is very handy. I also use the calculator and calendar (just shows dates) occasionally.

When my nieces first saw it they were astonished that phone technology had advanced to the point where it was possible to make a phone that was so much smaller than the smartphones they had.

[Caver_Dave]

Surely ideal for children

OK, they can still text and call the Paedos, but it cuts down on so many of the other channels.

Perfect for any father to give to their daughter.

Have a son and you only have to worry about one dick. Have a daughter and have to worry about all of them!

[adam 40]

Re: Surely ideal for children

Including, it seems, your own one, sir!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Surely ideal for children

> they can still text and call the Paedos

That's an unfortunate surname if ever I saw one.

> Have a son and you only have to worry about one dick. Have a daughter and have to worry about all of them!

Yeah, it's not as if boys have ever been the victims of sexual abuse, is it? *rollseyes*

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Surely ideal for children

Yeah, it's not as if boys have ever been the victims of sexual abuse, is it? *rollseyes*

Dave was referring to something that is rather overlooked as being a thing these days: normal consensual intercourse.

My father-in-law had 5 daughters, and the neighbours on all sides had knocked up daughters with spawn sired by wastrels. He was as relaxed as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Props to him: all 5 got decent husbands.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Surely ideal for children

Dave had a picture of the child catcher and referred to "paedos", so you'll forgive my entirely understandable assumption that he was talking about predatory, er, *paedos* trying to engage children in discussion, not some random lech involved with his teenage daughter who was old enough to consent.

[Bebu]

Re: Surely ideal for children

《My father-in-law had 5 daughters, and the neighbours on all sides had knocked up daughters with spawn sired by wastrels. He was as relaxed as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Props to him: all 5 got decent husbands.》

And how many unmarked graves? :)

The neighbours weren't aware of birth control or were of a religious persuasion that precluded it?

You can't do anything now without a smartphone and getting to the point that this evening it was a real PITA to order and pay for a meal in the local tavern without installing and using the establishment's app. A high quality piece of software that, I am sure. (Not!) Lunacy. Cash might be king but more like a raving Lear every day.

While assuming the elderly are not capable of mastering smartphone technology isn't based on any real evidence - more a case of wisdom concluding why complicate simple but neccessary tasks and why bother at all with the unneccessary?

One aspect of this is the adverse effects on the visually impaired - as we age vision does degrade through cataracts, glaucoma, macula degeneration etc etc. I already have my cheap simple phone on high contrast but as I have eschewed using it for anything more than calls and texts I am not too worried if one day I cannot used it. I wonder do they have braille phones?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Surely ideal for children

"I wonder do they have braille phones?"

There is software that allows most modern phones to be used by blind people (note, I am one and speak from experience here). This is most common on smartphones, where both Android and IOS devices have screen readers which can be used to operate them independently. They use speech output by default and, if you want to use Braille, you have to buy a separate Braille output device and connect them. They do it that way because Braille devices are expensive, so it makes most sense to treat them as a peripheral and use one with any device rather than to build them in. Modern simple phones using KaiOS or a limited version of AOSP tend to have one of these as well.

I would guess that something even simpler, such as the device mentioned in this article, has no accessibility options and takes you back to my first years with a phone. At that time, before smartphones were as popular, basically no phones had accessibility options. I had a completely normal flip phone which would not read anything. I could dial numbers if I had memorized them, use the speed dial function if someone sighted had previously entered the numbers for me, and that was basically it. SMS was completely unavailable to me. If you become blind, you're living in a much more convenient time.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Surely ideal for children

You can't do anything now without a smartphone

Maybe you can't. I certainly can. I can't think of anything I've had to do that required a smartphone. The corporate bastards who run U-Haul threaten to charge you extra if you have a human check you in when you return equipment, rather than using a smartphone for it, but I've never actually been assessed the charge, probably because the franchises I deal with are run by decent people and not corporate bastards.

I am aware that in some places things are different. That's rather my point: not everyone is me, and not everyone is you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Surely ideal for children

> That's an unfortunate surname if ever I saw one.

You must be thinking of [e-mail]

[biddibiddibiddibiddi]

Basic Wi-Fi would be a good addition to allow Wi-Fi Calling and even tethering, but perhaps that's too much additional cost for a small benefit when there should be virtually no other use for data services. Texting must be awful on this thing, given how most of the incoming messages would be full of emojis that it can't display properly. 48MB of RAM is really funny given how large a single chip/package of RAM is, even DDR2; it seems like they must have found a stash of very early, small LPDDR2 chips somewhere and wanted to use them up.

[Spazturtle]

Yep the Unisoc T107 uses LPDDR2.

[doublelayer]

A lot of modern flip phones have WiFi. Yes, they also usually have a basic web browser, but you are free not to use it, and if I remember correctly from when my friends showed me the experience of using a flip phone to browse, you wouldn't want to use it anyway. There are many phones more capable than this one but without the interfaces of a normal smartphone, so they can often let you opt out of smartphone activities because they either can't install apps or can install them but you wouldn't be able to use them well.

[yetanotheraoc]

Bonus

"most of the incoming messages would be full of emojis that it can't display properly"

I wouldn't mind an emoji suppressor on my current smartphone.

[LybsterRoy]

-- Texting must be awful on this thing --

Yes, but us real Luddites (Doro user here) don't text much if at all!

[Michael Wojcik]

Texting must be awful on this thing, given how most of the incoming messages would be full of emojis that it can't display properly

I'm puzzled by this sentence. The first clause implies a problem, but the second clearly describes a benefit.

(Also, the plural of "emoji" is "emoji". It's a Japanese noun, literally "picture-word", and as with other Japanese nouns the simple plural is not inflected. "Emojis" is a barbarism.)

[Dr. G. Freeman]

A bit like my Samsung e1270, pretty much the thickest of thick phones, rings, texts that it.

Don't want a smartphone, people might contact me.

[karlkarl]

I have the Nokia 2660 Flip.

Good form factor but the OS leaves a lot to be desired. It is not as good as the classic Nokia 3310 equivalent.

- Often the layering of screens gets mixed up and you end up with a garbled mess

- Upon restart, often text messages are a completely random order (date sort seems buggy).

- It didn't update the time to daylight saving time correctly. The "enable" toggle button seemed defective?

- I have seen a 32nd month in some places of the OS (I think it was the sms/messages screen) during February.

The battery lifespan is *OK*. I would have expected better for modern tech and a "simple" OS.

Is there any way we can get an actual 3310 or 3210 or 66xx produced in 2024? They were still so much better.

So if this new "boring" phone is produced, hopefully the OS gets a bit of a review. I do like the concept!

[Marty McFly]

Next up....

"Novelty" phones with wires and a dial instead of buttons!

[My other car WAS an IAV Stryker]

Re: Next up....

I've always wondered why we couldn't marry a recharging dock with dialing keypad and physical handset -- the kind we could balance on a shoulder and not have to stick things in our ears -- for the various slab-phones, especially the "Fruit Factory Jesus phone" (as El Reg used to call it). Wouldn't need a separate display since the phone's own screen could activate and provide you the caller ID, mute, speakerphone, conference and other options. I would take this over any Bluetooth earbud/headset any day -- old-school interfaces to newest tech.

Requirements: 1) hold phone at working angle similar to laptop screen; 2) charge phone; 3) provide dialing capability from physical buttons; 4) provide audio interface via old-school handset (with the smaller-than-RJ11 jacks so you can swap in your favorite or change colors, or change the cable when it got too twisted); 5) hold the handset when not in use (and hang up the call -- nothing like a good SLAM). Only a power supply required since the phone has the call & Wi-Fi radios. Bonus for a separate audio-out stereo jack (3.5 mm) for playing music (when not on a call) to my existing desktop speakers.

[doublelayer]

Re: Next up....

That would be pretty easy to build. Run it all through the USB connection as a keyboard and audio device and you're looking at a pretty basic case and electronics. The only part I don't know about is whether the RJ11 connection needs any custom controllers, but given how old it is, I somehow doubt it. Now all you have to do is find enough people who want one to make funding it worthwhile. I don't want one, so maybe croudfunding could find people who do.

[Martin-73]

Re: Next up....

The smaller than RJ11 connector the OP was on about is a 4C4P connector, and on most 90s ish phones is simply a 32 ohm earpiece (or similar) and a condenser microphone. There is not actually a standard though, and some phones used a dynamic or even carbon mic with the same connector

[Bebu]

Re: Next up....

《I've always wondered why we couldn't marry a recharging dock with dialing keypad and physical handset ....》

I have seen in a local variety/department store a 4G/LTE handset the in the same form factor as the old telcos' POTS desktop 'dog bone' handset offerings with a digital dialer and a small mono lcd screen for texts. Probably not as simple as it looked as I guess it might permit wifi tethering, wifi calling etc etc.

Who would have imagined vinyl (LPs) and requisite scratch-o-matic turntables making a comeback*? (Thermionic valve amps have always had their [delusional?] fans.) The rotary dialer might again be de rigeur. ;)

* I would have thought modern turntables would use lasers and modern signal processing to scan the vinyl's tracks - a sort of lidar for the terrain of an LP's surface but no they persist in dragging a rusty needle along the furrows.

[MrRimmerSIR!]

Re: Next up....

You mean one of these? https://www.elpj.com/

[Bebu]

Re: Next up....

Agent 86's shoe phone would be favourite.

Although irresponsibly discarded dog crap could make calls rather unpleasant.

The cone-of-silence still top of my list. :)

[frankyunderwood123]

Nokia 3310?

If simple and boring and retro is what you are after, cheap as chips!

[anthonyhegedus]

progress

"a whopping 48 MB of LPDDR2 RAM"

Time was when this wouldn't have been said with sarcasm but with - not unwarranted - hyperbole. Coming from the days of computers with 16K rampacks and calculators with 448-byte memory modules (yes, BYTE!), what on EARTH do you need 48MB for in a simple phone?!

[biddibiddibiddibiddi]

Re: progress

Customer Experience Improvement Program telemetry.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: progress

For DOOM, obviously.

/s

[J.G.Harston]

On a more serious angle, I am actively looking for some sort of dumb phone for my elderly non-tech mother, and this is the sort of stripped-down stuff it needs. Just. A. Phone.

It needs to have: big buttons, actual *TOUCH* buttons, ones that *ACTUALLY* move when you press them so that you know that you've pressed them; the ability to make and receive telephone calls. Desirable: contacts list, clock. Full stop.