But why a new phone?
Not many people buy a Nokia 105 for reviewing. I certainly didn’t. My Samsung phone had developed this weird syndrome that it would randomly decide not to let me hear the other person’s voice in a phone call. And while I was okay with something as minor as that, many of my friends and family members weren’t so much. I mean, it worked fine for 95% for the things, except for making a phone call, which I average at around 1-2 every day.
So after couple of months of this struggle, I decided that I had two options. Either fix the phone (which involved flashing stock rom, do some A-B testing and if it still doesn’t work, visit the service centre), which was a lot of work and may require money, or get a new phone just for calling, which was easy but definitely required money. After thinking for a bit, I went with this nice phone that I found on Amazon. The deal was in around INR 948, which felt decently cheap, so I bought it.
Review
In a nutshell: FM radio, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, torch, Micro USB connector for charging and a removable battery that lasts more than a week of normal usage.
I opened up the box and the phone instantly felt nice, something new, something interesting to look at, to start, to go through the menu. It was like the first time I went through an Android phone. Nowadays, everything is either Android and iOS, and there’s not much to look at in your colleague’s new phone. But this felt new. The phone doesn’t lag, and key-press to ready-for-operation time is negligible. They keypad is backlitted, and keys are soft to touch and takes some getting used to, not exactly my most preferred keyboard, but works fine for most things (which is just texting and dialing numbers, to be honest).
The display is QQVGA, which is quarter of a quarter of a VGA. For comparison, Apple Watch has 6.3 times more pixels on its screen than this phone. And just for the heck of it, Samsung’s current flagship phone, the Galaxy S9 has 222 times more pixels. Yes, two hundred and twenty two times. But here’s the thing, it more than works for most purposes. It has 4MB of RAM and 4MB of ROM. You can even play Snake on this thing. Isn’t that super cool?
It has a very dim torch too, but works fine and can be switched on from homescreen with a double click on the top arrow key. The features that set it apart from the many phones I’ve seen and tried in the recent times are the FM radio, 3.5 mm headphone jack and a week long battery life. In all honesty, I charged this phone last Sunday afternoon, and today is exactly a week since that. The battery indicator is still around 30-40%, and I’m certain it will last 2-3 more days. Isn’t that plain insane? The sizes of battery may have improved but so have the components that will drain it. And then suddenly you have a phone with a decent battery size (around 800mAh) but nothing to actually drain it and it feels like a phone from another planet. Thumbs up for that.
Conclusion
The phone is good, the quality is decent, most importantly, it just works. If you need a secondary phone that won’t die out in the middle of the day, this phone can take that spot. If you just want to get away from the habits of checking your social apps during commute, then you might consider using this as your primary phone and using that smart phone as an mp3 player cum ebook reader. It is a win win win; 1. You have a phone with amazing battery life. 2. You don’t get distracted and can finish reading that book without the urge of checking reddit/replying whatsapp. 3. Your smartphone’s battery life improves quite a bit without a SIM and data connection.
Thank you for reading