A knockdown Nokia ... but at a price

MY DAD is so stingy that he’s been known to use tea bags twice to save money. Sadly, as the years roll by, I can slowly feel myself turning into him.

I’m not quite at the reusing-the-tea-bags stage yet, but I am increasingly enamoured of ‘bargain’ phones, particularly since this offers the chance to look down one’s nose at iPhone owners.

The big question is, as the song has it: ‘How low can you go?’

I’m a big fan of mid-priced handsets, such as the Chinese OnePlus devices. But the new Nokia 2 isn’t mid-priced – it’s cheap: outrageously so, in fact.

At just £100, this android phone is a tenth of the price of iPhone X – so you won’t still be in mourning a month later if you drop it facedown on concrete.

The Nokia’s 5in screen is bright and the battery lasts two days. It’s a bittersweet reminder of the days when Nokia ruled the mobile world.

Sadly, almost everything else about the device is terribly bad. The screen is unresponsive, and you spend a lot of time looking at whirling circles as you wait for pages to load.

The camera is diabolical and there’s no fingerprint reader. This means you have to unlock with a PIN every time you use it. It’s like time-travelling back to how phones were eight years ago.

As a replacement phone – or if you’re buying one for an undeserving child – it’s not too bad. But the big problem is that the far-superior Nokia 3 is only £30 more – and even my dad would consider it in this case.