Nokia 1110

Nokia 1110 Mobile Phone (on Optus pre-paid)

The 1110 is an old 'dumb' mobile phone which my parents bought for me to replace an even older Nokia that was having battery issues. It was purchased outright for the huge sum of $64 and runs pre-paid on Optus $30/6month recharge plan.

The phone has a monochrome screen, about 2 inches square in size. Instead of a gray/white pixel colour it has a nice green glow. It has dedicated hardware keys covered in a soft gel-like plastic. It weighs next to nothing, and the battery will last on standby for about 6 days. Talk time is about 2 hours. It comes pre-installed with Snake, has an alarm, and a calculator. All these features are buried in the menu, but there is a shortcut key that when combined with a numeric or directional key, can go straight to feature pages.

The Good:
- Battery life. This phone beats most modern phones on standby. When used primarily as a SMS device and for receiving calls, this is very convenient.

- Alarm. Because of the low standby power drain, this phone can work as a miniature alarm clock. It even has snooze!

- Standby clock. In standby mode, the screen backlight turns off, and a digital clock is displayed that can be seen in daylight. So the phone can double as a timepiece without having to unlock.

- SMS. By limiting the phone to SMS, messages are kept brief and to the point.

- Physically diminutive. Due to the small non-touch screen, the phone size and weight is not an issue. It can fit in almost any pocket. I've even been able to temporarily hold it in those tiny coin pockets that are inside one of the normal pocket on a pair of tight jeans. It sticks out a bit and I can't bend forward, but you get the picture.

- Rugged. I could drop this phone from shoulder height and it would...break. But being so cheap, I wouldn't care. I'd just buy a new one.

- Phone. It makes and receives phone calls. There isn't a special way to hold it to get it to do this.

- It's dumb. Being a dumb phone, you will never find yourself using it like a smart phone. You won't be looking through it at a concert, because it doesn't have a camera. You won't be ignoring other people while they talk to you because it doesn't have internet. You won't find yourself addicted to it because it doesn't have anything fun on it (unless you find snake fun).

- Price. At $64 for the handset, plus $30 recharge that lasts 6 months, my total cost over ownership over the past 24 months is <$200. Since there is no data, there is no chance of going over caps or anything like that.

- Composer. You can write your own ringtone on the niftly included composer. It's only monophonic, but you can still create something that resembles the theme to Indiana Jones. You can even assign this tone to incoming calls, SMS, reminder, or the alarm.

- Simple. This phone is so simple to use, a senior citizen could use it. I was going to say so simple a baby could use it, but these days babies are able to write the driver code to get H.264 video to play natively on a 600x480 screen at 30fps. Most older folk I know prefer the uncomplicated things in life.

The Bad:
- No colour. Apart from the green and black, this phone has no colour. Since you can't put anything colourful on it anyway, this isn't such a bad thing.

- No pictures. This phone doesn't support pictures or any picture services. There a graphics but they are treated as text objects and won't be compatible with the graphical text systems used by modern smartphones.

- Talk time. Talk time is quite short as the electronics used to facilitate the audio transmission systems are old and their rated power envelopes are from the 1900s...oops, I mean 1990s.

- Radiation. From memory, this particular model had a lower than average radiation index, but this was compared to phones of the day. It doesn't have any other antenna's other than 2G, so this may mean less overall radiation, but I'm sure that when this thing handshakes the basestation I'm getting more rads pumped into the side of my head than the modern smartphone counterparts.

- Isolation. This phone has no social accessibility above the normal talk and SMS. As long as you use this phone you will never be a Foursquare champion.

- No music. There are polyphonic ringtones. This phone doesn't support them. I also haven't found out how to import/export the mono ringtones, so anything I want I have to create myself in the composer. This can actually be quite fun, so not such a bad thing.

- Storage. The memory capacity of the phone is quite small. If all the custom ringtone slots are full, then you can fit about 50 old SMS's alongside about 150 phone numbers. The memory is all shared, so having a lot of one reduces the space available to the other.

- Old. This phone is old. It looks old, it smells old, it is old. If you were a retro nut, or have trouble with complex devices, then this is a good phone for you. If you are anybody else, this phone is crap.

Conclusion:
- This phone is the premier phone in it's class. The trouble some people may find is that this is the only phone in it's class (as long as you don't count the updated 1110i), and that class is waaaay down the list.
If you don't make a lot of calls and only intend to receive calls, this phone and prepaid combo is perfect. There is just enough credit on the plan to lead a normal social life using SMS only. If you need simple functions like an alarm, calendar reminder, stopwatch, clock/watch, light to find your house keys, then this phone will service all those needs. If you need anything above this, then you should look into getting a more advanced phone.

Score: 5/10.