Nokia 8110: Small, unsmart, yellow, great
28.2.2018
Translation: machine translated
Video: Stephanie Tresch
Where other stands at the Mobile World Congress are all serious and futuristic, Nokia celebrates itself and shows that extremely good things can still come from the past. Today: The Nokia 8110 in banana yellow.
The bad joke literally offers itself up. That's what makes it so bad. Next to the bright yellow Nokia 8110 at the Mobile World Congress is a bowl full of bananas. All right, then. Video producer Stephanie Tresch and I get carried away with the banana joke after a poetic singsong sound check. Without further ado, we claim that it's the Nokia 8110. Haha. Funny. We feel ashamed. A little bit.
Not because the joke is so bad, but because we're making a bad joke about a pretty great feature phone. Feature phone is the technical term for unsmart phones. In common parlance, the parts are sometimes called dumbphones. This is because phones like the newly launched Nokia 8110 don't want to be able to do everything for everyone. They want to be a reliable, stable and durable partner for all those who can do without modern bells and whistles. But not snake.
Seriously: The Nokia 8110 at a glance
We can't stop smiling during the whole shoot at the constantly overcrowded Nokia stand. The phone is too funny, the concept too absurd and the realisation too great. All of this combined makes us laugh. We miss a take or two because either I or Stephanie are carried away by the infectiously good mood at the stand.
The Nokia 8110 can do little, but it does it well. The 2 megapixel rear main camera runs much more smoothly than that of the Nokia 3310 from last year. No idea why, because the 0.5 GB RAM doesn't really allow for much. On the other hand, the phone doesn't have to run an Android or iOS distro, but KaiOS instead.
There's not much to say about the 8110, because it can't really do much and there's not enough time at the extremely busy stand. It is extremely light and easy to hold and somehow makes you happy. We want about four of them. Others at the stand too. We are filmed while filming. An American camera crew steals our "Banana Banana" chant. I can't stop pressing buttons.
Another new feature is the fact that the phone with the front slider is 4G-capable. This is of particular interest to smartphone-hungry people in Switzerland, as 2G will soon be switched off. So if you want a Nokia 3310 dumbphone but want to use it for a few more years - most likely without ever having to charge it - then you'll be left out in the cold when 2G dies. But not with the 8110. That remains indefinite.
Because the 8110, with its 117 gram weight and its plastic case that feels quite sturdy, doesn't seem to be going anywhere, just like the feature phone trend.
A brand continues to celebrate itself
Nokia is pretty much alone in the exuberant and informal atmosphere at its stand. Other booths are playing it serious or futuristic and Nokia is going "Yo, we're back". There's more party than curiosity at the stand. Because here live the dead.
The Nokia 8110 runs KaiOS, an operating system built on the basis of the now dead and buried Firefox OS. Until 2015, the operating system from Mozilla was supposed to be able to display all modern content on a dumbphone without all the bells and whistles, heavy and expensive operating systems. That didn't work and Firefox gave up three years ago.
However, just as Nokia didn't give up and has re-emerged from obscurity as the only world-renowned product from licence holder HMD Global Oy, KaiOS has risen from the ashes of the Firefox. KaiOS seems to work. So well, in fact, that it doesn't really differ much from Symbian OS in the ultra-short test at the MWC. Neither visually nor in terms of handling.
In short: Nokia should be dead, but it's better than ever. Firefox OS should be dead, but is better than ever. And the whole thing is still fun.
That's good.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
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