Product rating for Nokia 800 Tough

lb

5 years ago

+2

3

1

If you really need a dumbphone, just buy a 30.- one.

I was expecting was merely a Samsung C-3350 with a 3.5mm headphone jack and service continuity (old GSM getting killed soon).

The good points are the very nice styling, good build quality (I would have prefered maybe a softer keypad with more grip, but that's debatable), and as far as I can tell, it is upholding its promises about being dropsafe and weatherproof. Form factor is OK for my needs.

The styling of the OS is very nice, I like its minimalism and simplicity ; the UX, on the other side, is quite terrible. I used the phone for about a month and never got comfortable enough to "automatize" my most used processes. I could live with it, tho, it's more or less on par with most early '00s dumbphones. 3.6, not great, not terrible.

Call sound is OK. Typing texts on that keyboard can be annoying, but I had years of experience with dumbphones (and I will switch to voice if needed) and I can live with that.

What really killed it for me was :

- the terrible battery autonomy. I thought the claimed autonomy was probably optimistic, but we're talking from 5-6 hours of intensive work with the phone, to at most 6 days on stand-by without 4G nor BT. On an average week, I'll probably send a few mails, SMS, have maybe 3 minutes of phone conversation ; outside of that, I will listen for a few hours of music and use the wake up alarm.

- the lack of a decent audio app. I'm not picky, but there is no podcast app available, and the music app is really worse that what you could find on an entry level Nokia in 2007. The playlist manager is appalling, the phone is unable to bookmark where the track paused if you quit the app, making it perfectly unusable for mixtapes, audiobooks or manually imported podcasts.

In effect, most apps are not very useful ; WhatsApp is frustrating, Google Maps is dumb. Google Assistant is not that bad but with limited ressources.

Besides these two main points, the camera is terrible. If you really need to take a picture of something in an emergency (like after a car crash to show the situation to your insurer), it should do the job.

I've read that the flash/flashlight was 180 lumens. After some testing, the only flashlight I own that is weaker is a Maglite Solitaire from the late 90s. Otherwise, the torch is weaker than a cheap keychain flashlight. It will be OK to illuminate a door lock, and your path if you're in a very light environment. In the woods, the practical range is about 2 meters. 18 lumens, maybe.

I bought that phone because I was looking for a reliable, outdoorsy , long running time alternative to my smartphone, with a secondary goal to rely a little less on the shiny moving pictures shown on the screen.

What I really like to see as an evolution :
- a Nokia/KaiOS modern app for music, books & podcasts ;
- a removable battery ;
- a way bigger battery ;
- a serious optimisation of KaiOS ;
- an e-Ink screen to make it even more frugal ;
- USB-C
- dedicated physical keys for volume. more