LAS VEGAS—The Nokia 215 is such a classic, it should play Snake. Microsoft's latest low-cost phone feels like a smash hit from a decade ago, but it costs only $29 and lasts nearly a month on a charge. I spent a little while with it here at CES in Las Vegas.
There's a method to Microsoft's retro design here. Along with its fits-and-starts Windows smartphone business, Nokia and Microsoft have had a solid "mobile phones" business for years, selling $30 phones to people in places where the annual income doesn't break $1,000.
The 215 is a smooth little plastic lozenge which echoes the wraparound polycarbonate design on the Lumia smartphones. It comes in black, white, and green. It's wonderfully durable; you can bounce it around without much trouble. It has a traditional numeric keypad, and the buttons are a slightly wiggly, black rubbery material. The small cursor pad isn't ideal, although I could get used to it very quickly; while it's a four-way navigation button, it has a little more wiggle to it than I'd like.
The interface on the 2.4-inch, 320-by-240 color screen is also something out of 2004: a four-by-four grid of tiny icons, with downloads restricted to a "games" department. Opera Mini and Bing take pride of place for Internet access; there's also a music player (and MicroSD card slot), Twitter and Facebook clients, calendar, calculator, FM radio, and flashlight. I dipped into the games menu and ended up playing what appeared to be an extremely simplified version of Asphalt 6, in Chinese. There's a single VGA camera on the back. It's awful.
The 215 connects with 2G EDGE, once more like it's 2004. It doesn't have Wi-Fi. Opera Mini is an accelerated, compressd browser, designed to offer better performance on slow networks like EDGE.
The Nokia 215 not only will never come out in the U.S., it won't work on any of our networks. Oh, well.