Going back to your ‘greatest hits’ can always be a good strategy to get you back in the public eye. Having successfully tried it with the Nokia 3310 Nokia have now repeated it with the 8110. This is the banana phone made famous in the film The Matrix and it’s now back in an updated form.
Available in yellow and the less stand-out black, it now boasts 4G support, but sadly does not have the spring-loaded slider seen in the film – it’s still manual! The screen is automatically activated when you slide the cover down and you can activate it with the cover still up. The 2.4” TFT screen is not touch-sensitive, so you have to access everything via the physical keypad.
Runs on KaiOS
So, what do you get for your £90 or so? Well, it’s a plastic, but sturdy construction, weighing in at 117g. It ships with the KaiOS operating system, giving you access to a number of apps like Facebook, Twitter and Google Maps. It comes with 4GB of storage, expandable via a MicroSD card to 32GB and 512MB of RAM.
The new version has a Snapdragon 205 processor powered by a 1500mAh battery. Neither of which sound impressive, but power this feature phone perfectly. This combination delivers a standby time of 25 days (on 3G) and talk time of 11 hours. It will also power its own music player for 2 days solid if you want to listen to all your music for that long! All of which makes it a good second or emergency-use phone.
Camera and video
A welcome addition to the new version of the Nokia 8110 is a single 2MP camera with LED flash. Obviously, you won’t get the range or quality of pictures you would get on a much more expensive smartphone. But, if you take just the occasional snap, or need it to record something memorable, the camera and video recorder perform perfectly well.
Finally, it comes complete with a 3.5mm headphone jack (hurray!), its own set of headphones, internal speaker and a micro USB port.
If you like the style and feel of the Nokia 8810 in your hand be aware that it does not fit well in tight pockets due to the curve that keeps the speaker and microphone tight to your face when you are on a call. Still, you can’t have everything!
