HMD Barbie Phone
hmd.com
hmd.com
USB-C and LTE, but a 0.3 MP camera is a very odd combination. I'm impressed that it's even possible to source a camera module this crappy in 2024.
It does work very well for this screen resolution.
And what else would you do with this media given it's a feature phone?
Send it to someone? It probably supports MMS. Or transfer it to your computer over USB-C/bluetooth.
VGA is not that bad for phone pictures. If you scale down a photo from decent camera to VGA, it can look fine. The problem is that for VGA cameras, the resolution is the smallest issue - colors, sharpness, dybamic range are likely tragic.
You're right. It is the terrible jpeg compression which destroys everything.
This is an example of an image from my daughter's VGA camera: https://imgur.com/oMNkrUm
The image has ~100 KB which is plenty for this resolution. But the input data from the sensor is awful because the sensor and the optics are awful.
But the camera, not sure why you'd even bother.
But my clear understanding was that 2G was long gone, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/reviews/B004FTF6H4/
Excerpts:
"My husband has never allowed me to write, as he doesn't want me touching mens pens."
"I bought it for all my female friends and relatives. It enabled them, finally, to write things (although they may not yet know to do so on paper; but you can only expect so much, really)."
aside, but relevant: HMD is largely made up from old Nokia mobile phone hw guys and they probably feel that they've now established themselves in the market as "The guys that did the Nokia Android phone smartphone reawakening". They probably feel that they have some leeway to try out new stuff.
When they made a comeback back in 2017, there was enthusiasm in the market from the old Nokia users. Even then they failed to produce some good devices. Their phones were expensive and less features with other rivals. Just because Nokia has reputation for creating robust phones, which certainly cost a lot, you have to sacrifice a lot of features just to put your phone in metal enclosure. They tried for couple of years, and they just give up. Now they just try to attract old people to buy their Keypad phones. We see no innovation in keypad phones too. Just old phones getting released at heigh price in cheaper plastic than original ones.
Certainly, there is a lot of room in keypad phones especially in developing nations. Just make it cheap and with a lot features. People will buy that phone having Nokia branding than a Chinese branded cheap keypad phone having same features.
That said, i'd rather get something like a PinePhone, the software might be worse than most Android devices but at least i can replace/rewrite/do_something_with it.
Eventually I got a cheap Nokia 9290, and it was heaven. My last (good) QWERTY phone was an E90 which was the perfect form factor.
I have loosened up since then and care less about writing properly while texting. I still want an E90 running Android.
(Side note: I had an Astro slide, and I wanted to love it, but the overall quality was not there)
Hitting the period instead of space is extremely common, as are many other typos.
I miss my Blackberry keyboard. Everything else is so much better these days.
> I guess my point is more that I wish the communication styles enabled by smartphones and the social expectations they carry weren't the norm. I'm not even really sure what I would do if I could wish my own phone into existence.
I also broadly agree with the usual laundry list of complaints: closed platforms, surveillance, ads, lack of innovation, smartphones being more like status symbols than actual pieces of technology.
I agree all of that. Usage patterns are garbage. But still, incredible technology, squeezed in a tiny box.
Of course, for the companies that control these "smartphones", they are not garbage.
I guess my point is more that I wish the communication styles enabled by smartphones and the social expectations they carry weren't the norm. I'm not even really sure what I would do if I could wish my own phone into existence.
A colleague of mine bought (on a store) one of the models that was going to be released in another country. He customized it with a Disney Princesses theme and glued a few stickers. He gave it as a birthday present to his daughter. A unique model nobody else had.
Remember the cool LED patterns on the Nothing phone? It’s notable when people try to bring new mobile phone concepts to market.
How is S30 not dead? I think it a lot more interesting then yet another app adding AI.
It is worth wondering how long product designers can keep adding features to smartphones to justify the frequent upgrade cycle
And also worth wondering about if all the increase in capability of devices is really an meaningful increase in usefulness/happiness from the device usage, if some consumers are starting to crave less capable phones
Guess if they want to go after a different demo, they could make a GI Joe phone. The “action figure” phone.
I wonder if they'll bring back Series40 and eventually S60, and we'll be discussing SIM unlocking with paperclip jigs and rolling back clock for AllFiles hack through AppTRK like it's 2007 again.
Imagine if all the effort that went into this thing would have been directed towards getting Signal or WhatsApp onto a dumbphone.
Edit: Looking more at the specs and the promotional material, this starts to make a little more sense. Barbie brand the phone, in an attempt to make it trendy, so that young girls will want it. Avoid adding the social media, so not to expose the girls to an environment which we know to be bad for them. It actually makes a little sense, but sure if young teens are that into Barbie though. I'd love to see the sales numbers next year.
So these phones are mostly useless going forward. Fancy, but under powered, and unable to pull off instant messaging in a reliable enough manner.
My son used a Nokia 7880 for the past 3 years, i unsuccessfully tried switching to a nokia 800 tough from January to May this year and intended for my daughter to have her own flip Nokia phone, to no avail.
We reluctantly had them switch to secondhand smartphones over the summer...
Anyway, Signal doesn't approve use of the third-party clients. Tough luck. Dumb-phone-with-Signal has to be a collaboration with Signal-the-company.
Congratulations, you made my skin crawl.
I'm quite familiar with Signals opposition to third-party clients. I maintained my own fork of their app for about a year in order to keep SMS support. Eventually my fork got so wildly out-of-sync with upstream that I just couldn't keep up anymore.
Why /s?
Stories is exactly an example of a feature being toxic (especially, but not exclusively) for children.
https://www.catphones.com/?srsltid=AfmBOop7oxm5E4SE4gl9lrSpc...
Now _that_ is a killer feature. No Android or Apple phone has that. /s