Pro tip: don't buy the new versions "Nokia 3210 2024" and similar models. I did, two times, with slightly different models, and they are of exceptionally poor quality: dead after one year, very buggy firmware. The customer support is an AI with no real answer. They recommended to install an app "from the Google Play app store" which is nonsense for a dumbphone.
They are very cheap noname phones, branded with the name Nokia, but I am sure no Nokia R&D team was involved in these products.
They clearly don't have the old code base, workforce to hypothetically adapt it to VoLTE, or factories to manufacture the phones. New Nokia TA-xxxx phones use MediaTek/Unisoc(Spreadtrum) SoC and MediaTek MAUI software rebranded as "S30+". Which means those are reskinned Chinese phones.
Old Nokia had RM-xxx or RX-xxx model numbers, so it's also clear that some of their corpo structure did survive.
I tried a Nokia-in-name-only modern dumbphone (a compact one without the retro styling), and it did what I needed, which was mainly SMS 2FA.
Until a manager for a tempting job wanted to do the first call on the phone. The call quality was so bad, it bombed the interview for me. So I kissed my privacy goodbye, and bought an iPhone.
(I've since switched to a GrapheneOS phone, which works well, with less violating.)
What about a dumb phone ensure that call quality is terrible? Could you not have found a better dumbphone if you really wanted to stay with it?
I spent some time looking. There were some pricey "designer" ones, but they generally got poor reviews. Maybe it's easier to do a design-school exercise, than to get the phone guts engineering right. Also, mandatory VoLTE eliminated a lot of high-quality legacy devices that would've worked fine.
Yeah I bought a Nokia 2660.
After probably a month or so the hinge brackets broke from normal use.
Nokia refused to refund / repair it saying that only a drop could have caused it.
I replaced it with an AGM M8 which is a great dumbphone.
Thank you both for the warnings. I have been looking for a "dumb" phone and arrived at the Nokia and now I am eyeing up the AGM M8 FLIP Security+ [1] instead.
I'm noticing that the pricing is completely different on my desktop and mobile - I'm seeing the M8 Flip Security+ for $79 on mobile and $116 after sale cuts on desktop. I don't think it's a currency issue, I think it's a "my VPNs are set to exit IPs in different countries" thing. High in CA (with currency set to Global US$), low with Swedish IP.
Try AliExpress, the prices there look unbeatable and are from AGM official stores at that.
Interesting, it has the same stylings as the old Samsung flip phones - which were horrdendous to develop for on J2Me because of various bugs and the tools not giving you any good ways to get debug data from them.
i can confirm. I have bought and used both Nokia 2660 Flip and Nokia 8210 4G , both are HMD rebrands. Firmware is very buggy and battery failed after less than 2y .
I have a 235 4G and I'd say the firmware is 'quirky' but not particularly buggy in the five months I've had it.
> They are very cheap noname phones, branded with the name Nokia
I thought only HMD [0] had the right to put the Nokia brand on a phone, and had several former Nokia executives in their leadership able to validate whether a device is "worthy" of that brand. Which made sense since Nokia as a company and brand still exist albeit in a different field, and junk branded with this name can tarnish the image.
Edit. I see HMD may transition away from the Nokia brand. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMD_Global#:~:text=The%20compa....
[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/hmd_is_dropping_its_nokia_branding_...
Corporate quality standards only work if a company is MBA-proof. Something no western company can withstand. Sooner or later, a financial genius will point out the margins that can be made on white label products and it snowballs.
I'm curious what would need to change to fix this? Because enshittification has become so ubiquitous and terrible that it's in the dictionary now. Is it regulation? Antitrust? Obliterate every board and private equity firm? There must be an actionable set of steps out of this because we had to have stepped into it somehow
I bought an XR20 a few years ago and it's still running fine, and still receiving OS updates.
Given the lack of a Part 2, I'm guessing some of the optimism in the article about how easy it would be was misplaced. I know very little about this stuff but presumably he would need to write some code for the SIM7600SA that would allow it to interface seamlessly with the UI board, which sounds far from trivial (unless maybe the UI board is very well documented)?
I was hoping to find a part 2, but since part 1 was written over 2 years ago I guess there's not much chance of that...
It was not, infact, easier than he thought.
> "Thanks mostly to the phones age, interfacing with the UI board will be rather trivial"
I guess part 2 was left as an exercise for the reader.
Not that difficult, DIY dumbphones are mostly case, buttons, display, etc.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190827183214/http://alumni.med...
And a proprietary blob for actually communicating with the tower.
Yup. This is nothing more than "Hmm, this Nokia has its physical UI on a separate board... maybe I could use that somehow".
Yeah, not really a complete story is it.
Yep, all bait, no meat
> While the Memes generally refer to the 3210 or the 3310, the classic 5110 is no less a condender for most robust general use mobile phone available.
The reason for that (I think) is not that the 5110 is less robust, but that the 3210 and 3310 were much more widespread - they came onto the market when mobile phones really started to become widespread, while the 5110 (their predecessor), with its stub antenna and bulkier size, looks a bit like the last representative of the previous era...
Totally! When I got my Nokia 5146 (still basically a 5110) - you had to pay I think £50 for the phone, plus the contract of £15 a month.
A month or two later you could get the 3210 for free, plus a better contract from orange, that took advantage of the MMS options - plus had the programmable ringtones which was soooooo much cooler than the 5110.
I was lucky to jump from the 5110 to the 8210, and then to a 8250 which I adored and used on an off through to 2007 - when I moved to the E61 then e71 - which both still hold a very special place in my heart!
3210 did not support MMS, but EMS with some semi-proprietary extensions. Sending images and ringtones over EMS was generally not interoperable between different vendors.
MMS is much later technology where the user data go over HTTP, which implies at least WAP support and GPRS to be really practical.
You are totally correct - I was thinking of 'picture messages' which this could send. I was only a little jealous of the 3210 as i thought it was quite ugly really, but the 3310 seemed a heap better, especially with the blue led (which is what sold me on the 8250).
3230
Was a joy to use the joystick hehe
I'm not too well-versed in hardware - is it really that easy to swap out a 2G modem with a 4G modem and have it "just work" without touching the drivers? Even if the baseband/modem chips miraculously do conform perfectly to some I/O protocol at the hardware level despite being multiple generations apart, wouldn't the difference in timings break whatever firmware the Nokia 5110 has, which was expecting only a single very specific hardware configuration? Or is the author planning to also hack the drivers?
These phones didn't have the modern smartphone architecture where there are separate CPU cores for the user OS and the modem. It's one single CPU core that does both the UI and all the low-level stuff required for communication with the tower. They were going to replace the board that contains that CPU and all the radio circuitry with one they were going to design from scratch around that 4G module.
No, it's like reusing keyboard and monitor for a new PC. This phone uses those parts fully separated from the computer part that the author argues it should be possible to remake just the host computer part to recreate the experience.
4G doesn't even have a proper voice call support, and substitutes that with a carrier grade Discord type thing called VoLTE(oversimplification). Zero chance old firmware could work.
> 4G doesn't even have a proper voice call support, and substitutes that with a carrier grade Discord type thing called VoLTE(oversimplification).
That "carrier grade Discord type thing" is more or less standard SIP VoIP, just over a prioritized data channel similar to how DOCSIS has PacketCable which is more or less MGCP VoIP over a prioritized data channel.
It's absolutely proper voice call support, the majority of calls you make or receive in 2024 have been connected over SIP at some point along the path.
> Zero chance old firmware could work.
The sorts of modules like the author was proposing using can be interacted with over relatively standard AT commands, so it's actually plausible that if there were a separate application processor it might be able to perform basic functions like placing/receiving calls without any firmware changes. The module handles all the VoLTE stuff and just exposes it as if it were any other modem.
That said it's not uncommon for "dumbphone" type applications to run the application code on the baseband processor, in which case obviously it's incredibly unlikely that this new module is even a related family of processor, much less compatible with existing code.
>That "carrier grade Discord type thing" is more or less standard SIP VoIP, just over a prioritized data channel...
It is completely restricted to one SIP provider. Which raises an interesting idea for improved competition. Make it possible for the user to choose their SIP provider. Force the phone companies to allow the use of that priority to any SIP RTP stream and otherwise make those companies just sell data service.
That would make a project like the one in the linked article come down to getting a magic module that provided an internet connection...
As a sibling says, this likely won't work for a Nokia feature phone, because it's an integrated design and there's no separate modem.
For a design with a modem module and a ux module, it might possibly just work to swap things out, but it would depend on how VoLTE is supported. If that is all managed by the modem module, then you're probably good.
These modem modules are generally a serial port that speaks Hayes (AT) protocol. Plus some analog lines for mic and speaker. Some 4g modules might be serial over USB and may leave VoLTE entirely up to the application module, that's going go look different.
Some of the modules are a qualcom SoC that runs headless Android. Which works, I guess, but seems bizarre.
No. This phones keypad , controller, and screen are on a separate board.
This would be like plugging your monitor and keyboard into a new computer.
There are some lorawan handheld communicatiors using surplus blackberry cases and keyboards from blackberries that never were, that they got for pennies.
Except this dude wants to drop in a roll-your-own cellphone board with a basic os, instead of a lorawan radio and basic os. Same idea. But he will have to design this.
Whereas You can get schematics to build a lorawan communicator with blackberry parts, and there are community supported roms for that
Your reply is less insightful than the original commenter.
I think the idea here is to basically create a new phone, but use the original case, buttons and display.
I just wish I could buy a phone that has the same look and feel (sound, screen, etc.) as the 5110, is compatible with modern networks, and has a modern battery.
No, of course not. That's why this article is two years old without an update.
What I learned with this article is the English idiom:
"Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched."
Which in my language translates to:
"You should not sell the bear’s skin before killing it."
Not that it appears in the article, but rather because the author wrote the blog post before doing the thing. Which results in a blog post essentially saying "here is the cool thing I plan to do", which was apparently never done.
Anyway, I'm happy to know about counting chickens now :-).
It's possible the author didn't expect to have a few thousand Hacker Nerds looking at their blog post already, with all the critique and pressure that entails.
Already? This blog post is from 2 years ago...
Fair enough. My point still stands that they may have been blogging this for themselves or a relatively small number of readers.
I'm reticent to criticize anyone for putting their unfinished or aspirational work up on the internet, it reminds me of a 'net where people hosted their own blogs for mostly noone. Writing destined for a small or non-existent audience feels precious when everything is made to game the attention system.
It's more gruesome about the chicken. These are also said to be counted in fall. It's not just about hatching (in summer), but rather about surviving till fall...
The original Nokia 5110 obviously lived long, probably still is there in author's drawer in some disassembled state.
Which language is it? In mine it's almost the same, "don't divide the skin of a non-killed bear".
It's in French. Not sure if it's exclusive to French but it's commonly used.
I am going to guess Russian.
Spanish I'd say
In French, the bear is killed. In Spanish, he is chased. In Dutch, he is shot. The Spanish look adventurous, and the French straight-forward.
The blog post is from 2022 and the sequel never arrived. So the idiom wins this one.
We have the same in Polish as well
Are there any not outrageously expensive, tough, battery-goes-for-weeks, does calls and SMS and wifi hotspot and maybe even F-Droid but a small screen, and maybe has at least LTE so that it is safe to be used for years, type devices?
I've looked once or twice, and found two categories: one was expensive phones leaning in to the "super slick minimalist" thing, which looked like they could be good devices and cover what I'm looking for, but again, 300 dollars or more type range.
The other was remakes of the "old classics", which were cheap, and claimed to cover roughly what I was hoping for, but are actually horrible quality, as another commenter said.
Maybe there's no solution, and those expensive ones are the only good option. Exceptions, or surprises, please throw them at me!
Yeah, look at the Sonim XP3+/XP5+ (depending if you want a flip phone or candybar).
Rugged, Android-Go powered "Call/SMS/MMS" devices, week and a half on battery if you leave it on constantly, hotspot, and you can, if you insist, sideload apps. Just, don't expect any modern Android app to be usable on a 240x320 screen with keyboard input only. If you use a Bluetooth mouse, it's marginally less-awful, but still, don't expect much to work.
I did get KDE Connect working - that allows you to send text messages with a real computer keyboard. It's not as nicely integrated as the Apple iMessage ecosystem, but it does allow for sending texts without having to T9 the whole thing. Alternately, the better option is to just move longer conversations to email or an actual phone call.
One of these shouldn't run you much over about $150 (in the US), and they work fine on the super cheap MVNO operators out there.
My writeup from about a year ago: https://www.sevarg.net/2023/12/30/more-flip-phone-sonim-xp3-...
It won't go for weeks, but days, and it takes some sideloading and finagling to get certain apk's to work, but I use a Sonim XP3+.
Runs Android Go, big battery that lasts a while, I can use Signal Messenger on it (though not super well), and it's tank-like in its construction. If you want to take that up a notch in terms of build quality, Kyocera sells a similar phone, the Dura XV Extreme+, which is roughly $250.
r/dumbphones is a decent resource. Unsuprisingly, it's not a large community, but it's a good place to get people's anecdotes about specific models.
HMD (Human Mobile Devices)[0] has exclusive rights to produce phones under the Nokia brand.
Now, HMD has decided to drop the Nokia name from the new phones because it's not helping them. Nokia has lost its glory, and HMD took the right step to use its name.
People who have old Nokia phones should keep them as it is like a lost meaningful art.
Sound incredible !
I like the word "simply" in this sentence
> i will simply be able to recreate the baseboard with the new 4G module, a microcontroller, and some audio processing and power management circuitry and it will be able to seamlessly fit inside the phone.
Seems like a bigger project than the author would let us think ! But I hope to see the PCB soon !
Well, I wouldn't call it trivial, but it's not completely outlandish idea. There is prior art in this Ringo kit, which does almost 90% of what's required here: https://github.com/CircuitMess/CircuitMess-Ringo
Especially funny as article is from 2022 Nov.
Author conjured a primordial black hole by working on an Nokia and was never heard from again.
> The Nokia 5110 is a 2G telephone, meaning it uses the original 2G mobile network to communicate. This network has long been decommissioned in most western countries, including Australia.
In Europe, 3G is shutting down, but 2G as a fallback seems to be staying for years to come.
> However, 2G networks were still available as of 2023 in most parts of the world, while notably excluding the majority of carriers in North America, East Asia, and Australasia.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G
AFAIK, in the US, T-Mobile still has a 2G network.
> AFAIK, in the US, T-Mobile still has a 2G network.
They do but most won't be able to use a phone this old on it. Reason being the SIM application was taken out of the issued sim cards years ago for T-Mobile (something like 6 years or so at this point). Newer 3G-era cellphones use the USIM application and can fall back to the 2G network.
So the only way to still use a device that's pre-3G (circa-2007 or so) on the 2G network is to have a SIM that's been activated the whole time. T-Mobile will not activate expired SIM cards that still contain the application.
Source: I have used back to the Sony Ericsson t68i this past summer on T-Mobile. If you have an ancient SIM and want to browse WAP 1.x as well you can use this site for the gateway: https://nbpfan.bs0dd.net/index.php?lang=eng&page=wap%2Fmain
EDIT: Funny thing about 3G-era phone support, you can use a euicc (removable ESIM) on a phone from 2007 (I used Sony Ericsson K850i) and it will work just fine with an activated esim to access 2G.
I am forever horrified when my 5G phone, which at my house already only gets 4G at best (the politics of cell towers in Southern England is just a sad sad story) drops now to 2G!!! Dropping a modern smartphone to 2G is like basically saying "no network". The only things I use it for are unusable. I rarely make calls. I rarely send SMS. Vodafone dropped 3G, O2 will drop it early next year and the others some time soonish too. Using a smart phone in a rural area now kind of feels like going back to 2007 if I am going to be honest.
2G is still strong in Germany as some industrial applications rely on it. It is not going to be deprecated any time soon. Maybe once they run out of spare parts.
Germany's mobile network is worse than most third world countries. Working on a train? No internet for you! Going a few meters outside a settlement? Might not even be able to do calls.
Such an exaggeration. >92% of the area is served with 5G. Calls are available in 98%-99% of the area (though sometimes just from one of the operators). Some trains were built in a way that blocks reception, though those have had repeaters or wifi for a while. I know plenty of people who work from the train every day.
Sources:
https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...
https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrain-Repeater
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Mobile-communications-for-rail-...
It is being deprecated now. Comparison map:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dumbphones/comments/1eppo3p/tmobile...
https://www.t-mobile.com/support/coverage/t-mobile-network-e...
>Capacity and coverage of T-Mobile's 2G (GSM) network is expected to change starting as early as September 1, 2024.
Correct. I still use my Nokia 6030 2G phone with T-Mobile in Minnesota/Wisconsin. And it's battery still lasts a week and I can't even feel it in my pocket it's so small. Impossible to destroy too; I've used roughly it since ~2008.
Looking for someone who can breathe new life into old phones, like Singer does with some Porsche models.
I'd kill for an EV 914.
Although I also loved the sound of that little engine.
https://canev.com/products/porsche-914-ev-conversion-kit-wit...
https://www.electricclassiccars.co.uk/products/electric-clas...
Now I need to find a 914 with a steering wheel on the right side (because of where I live).
While I really like the idea, I think we're still too far out tech wise to make it a reality in a way that it would live up to the dream. EVs of today are really heavy and even with a fairly small range, I fear the weight from the batteries would butcher any kind of driving experience for a car like that. In time though, I hope we get plenty of old cars retrofitted to be EVs as the tech becomes lighter, cheaper and more standardized.
The 914 was always more toy than car anyway, so a short range is not really a deal breaker.
People have been making EV VW Beetle since forever. The 914 is just a weird looking Beetle. :P
Probably have to accept it would be a short range car for going to work in warm but not hot weather and not a touring car.
The point isn't that it can't be done, EV conversions have been done for decades at this point, but that you'll get a car that's a whale compared to the original.
I think that you would still end up with the inferior battery life of 4G. That was the killer feature of those phones. Our technology seems to have degraded in that regard over the years.
4G drain faster our batteries but we also now download multiple orders of magnitude more data than we used to with the 5110 (I count voice call as "data"). Videos and advertisements being the usual suspects…
Battery would probably last a lot more if I only play snakes and use the phone app.
My old Nokia 6310i from 2003 was in use until a year or two ago with my mother in law. And with the original battery lasting for days! Then finally on/off button broke. While nowadays phones not only have a glass in the front, which is understandable, but in the back too. So fragile. What would grandpa Nokia say to his ancestors?
I had this phone, sometimes from boredom I was tossing and catching it and it occasionally fell on the ground. Try doing this with these miserable fragile iPhones and Galaxies. Unfortunately one day it cracked while falling and I regret so much throwing it, the 6310i would have been working until today.
The Quectel BG95 is a similar modem chip. If you want to add low-bandwidth connectivity in a project you can just get a BG95 or this Simcom as a devkit and e.g. a 1NCE SIM card, hook up the UART pins to your microcontroller and you're off to go. (You may need a logic level converter in between)
Two annotated board-repair photos for Nokia 6110 / 5110:
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_YF5WDLLK2nA/RhE6QSReO7I/AAAAAAAAB...
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_YF5WDLLK2nA/RhE44SReO6I/AAAAAAAAB...
Disassembly video (2019), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdhlOlx2gxY
Schematics: https://www.nodevice.com/service-manuals/telephone/nokia/611...
I was excited to learn the new word "eniminable", but I think you meant "inimitable", OP.
5110 was fantastic. I did not realize this before, but about 10 years ago needed a replacement phone quickly and had an old 5110 in storage. Charged up, powered up, switched on and in less than 10 seconds could make a call. Fantastic booting speed, very fast phone.
Found a video where the boot-up speed/usage are shown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d40KwKvCGZo
Should be marked as [2022].
Indeed, the announced Part 2 has not been linked so far...
It's such an odd problem from my perspective as someone who doesn't live in a western country! We still have 2G on all carriers and seemingly no plans to shut it down. So, if you want to use an old (GSM) phone, it's a non-issue, you just pop your modern SIM card into it and it just works :)
In my country (Poland) a bunch of networks recently switched off 3G and a lot of 4G services in favour of LTE only... A pretty good mobile service I enjoyed at my country home for over a decade had suddenly turned to crap... (at least I have faster Internet access now, but I can't strap a directional antenna to a mobile phone).
> bunch of networks recently switched off 3G and a lot of 4G services in favour of LTE only
You mean 2G and 3G in favor of 3.95G LTE, AKA 4G.
My country (Australia) in the past month shut down 3G and 2G was shut down in 2017.
The 3G shutdown was ...problematic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIJavqEzEIw
Nokia 5110 but with Android and full QUERTY keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7VOflsuVS4
The 5110 was also my first phone and still probably my favourite ever. I racked up a £300 bill on month 1 and had to essentially do my paper round for free to pay it off. Good times!
Just a wishful plan, nothing happened as it seems (post is 2 years old)
around the same time that the original 5110 was getting popular, I bought my first mobile phone, a used Motorola Amio.
It was quite big, with big buttons, and looked somewhat like a walkie talkie. I liked it and used it for about a year, before I got another make of phone.
I searched and found some images that look something like it:
I remember that Motorola, I was opening a student bank account and they offered a free 3 year student railcard (to buy discount tickets), a camera or that motorola - I was just about to get it when the lack of Snake and also the pretty poor contract it came on made me jump for the Railcard.
But still felt wild at the time that they were 'giving away' a mobile phone.
Bring back the 9210!
I would pay for a Nokia 5110 that is exactly like then except for the 4g call/sms part
Well good news for you – Nokia still sells plenty of these kinds of phones (just not in the USA). It’ll be pretty easy to import them from a developing market, on eBay or elsewhere. E.g. see https://www.amazon.in/s?k=nokia
HMD do sell a few Nokia-branded phones in the US; most of their international range is available on Amazon US.
I've had four HMD phones, two feature and two Android smart phones. The hardware usually feels really good, but all of them have had poor phone quality (even on different carriers). People would tell me if sound like I was underwater or far away from the phone while not using speaker), sometimes it would just drop the audio and I couldn't hear the other person, etc.
I guess I still have nostalgia for some of the late Nokia phones, like the n900 and e72.
My current Android HMD has been fine, but still has call issues (people often don't hear me for like 5-8 seconds when I call them; speak from just randomly stops working during calls).
I have had three HMD phones now, all have had very good call quality when used in Europe.
These new Nokia models/re-issues are of very poor quality, see my other comment.
They are not made by Nokia, but by HMD which has very low standards of product quality.
I think what parent meant is that he would be willing to pay good money to anyone who could clone the 5110 to use 4g and keep the same screen.
Wonder if this would be possible for my Kindle DX 3G? It has no Wi-Fi but I still hold onto it.
I recenly bought a Nokia 6300, not as a main mobile phone but because it includes Tethering, it is very light, changeable battery, practical as a mobile hotspot. It also has WhatsApp though.
> It also has WhatsApp though.
Not for much longer.
I also got a Nokia 6300 to use for tethering and it works well for that.
Good to know! Thankfully, WhatsApp is just a minor detail in this context: tethering is the core feature. I'm curious, how has your battery performance been while using tethering?
You need to keep it connected to the charger when tethering.
lol so he made this part 1 Nov 28 2022 and then disappeared
this was on the back burner for so long , very glad to see someone get it done. the amount of e waste caused by dropping 2g and 3g is insane.
