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Comment by foxpc | Hacker News Reader

For such a "dumbphone", it seems to be kind of pricey, in my opinion. The camera sensor is probably the most expensive there :)

For a seriously dumb phone, I'd go for a Nokia 100 or 101 (2 sim slots). It's got absolutely nothing - not any kind of web/wap accessibility, no front/back camera or a memory card slot. A resolution of a handsome 128 x 160 and a battery life of ~35 days. All for a price of ~20-40 bucks.

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What I'm curious is whether it's $150 after subsidies or before subsidies. If it's the latter, then this phone could easily be offered as a $0 phone on a two or three year contract.

Newsflash for non north americans.

I got all my smart phones, in a country where they run $800 each, for free with one year contract. And paid less for data. And sms was always included in the voice plan.

And i still complained about how expensive it was.

You know what else could be offered free on contract? An iPhone.

I thought they only did that with the two-generation-old-phones-that-they-want-to-get-rid-of-stock-of that they were selling for $99 off-contract.

The oldest iPhone is still quite a bit more modern than a Series 40 Nokia. You can buy plenty of phones for cheaper.

Agreed, but I can access Facebook and Twitter over SMS. What does a "Modern" enable me to do? Type long emails with my thumbs, play Angry Birds, and eat up the battery by having a huge screen and GPS powered on all day.

I bought a smartphone because it lets me check email when I'm sitting in lectures at university and I'm bored. I haven't really used my smartphone as a phone as much as its price would have you expect.

Maps are a biggy, at least for me.

I haven't paid a cent for my iPhones and I got all of them at launch. All were free on contract, and the 4 was actually free - as in I could have gotten the same contract without the phone and paid the same amount per month.

Free with data contract, mind you. That's a big price bump, and it's ongoing.

Frankly, I've got the worst of both worlds -- I bought my Android phone upfront, and I still pay extra for the data plan.

In theory I do this so I can change my plan and/or switch providers willy-nilly, but I never do because I don't want to lose a phone number that's not really "mine" to begin with.

I don't understand the need to be on a contract :)

I guess, that's just a thing that I won't understand because I'm not American.

Isn't the Nokia 100 monoband?

I'm not sure about that kind of stuff, but it's GSM 1800 and 900 so that's two bands, right? I don't know about the CDMA versions though.

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