Here comes a simple phone!

New Nokia phone makes a virtue of simplicity

HMD Global, inheritors of the famed Nokia name in smartphones, chose the unlikely locale of a metro rail station in Gurgaon to unveil their latest handset — Nokia 2.

Its USP will appeal to Indians: Long battery life — from a 4100 mAh cell. Older readers who have used the classic Nokia handsets like the 3310 or the made-for-India ‘Asha’ will remember that the phones easily worked for two days or more with a single charge. The Nokia 2 is a throwback to those less complicated days — it promises two days on a full charge.

In other ways, too, this is a phone whose mantra seems to be KISS — Keep It Sweet and Simple.

Built on a Qualcomm Snapdragon platform and sporting the Android 7.1.1 OS (upgradeable to Android 8 very soon), the 5inch HD display phone sports 8 MP autofocus rear (with flash) and 5 MP front cameras, 1 GB DDR3 RAM and 8 GB of storage, expandable to 128 GB. All these are fairly standard if unexciting specs.

But some nifty design has gone into the phone which ensures that all components, from chipset to display, have been optimised to suck in as little power as possible.

Nokia has resisted the temptation to load the phone with app-heavy user interfaces of its own, and has provided a lean-mean native Android, without any pre-installs or skins. However, the Google Assistant voice tool is there to make life little simpler. Network-wise, this is a 4G VoLTE device with dual nano SIM slots. The global price is 99 euros. It should be available in India before year end for under `7,000.