Top positive review
14 people found this helpful
Pretty awesome as a "detox" phone
By Alex Iglesias on Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2025
I got this as kind of a detox phone and I really like it!! It seems durable, it is easy to pop the back cover on and off to access the battery, SIM, and SD card reader, and it feels nice in the hand. The camera isn't really something you're gonna want to take all your pictures with but I took a picture and sent it to a friend and he mentioned how flip phone cameras have come a long way so I guess it's decent enough for quick pictures. The phone is fast enough. Doesn't hold a candle to my Galaxy S25 Ultra (of course not lol) but gets the job done. Texting is fine, call quality is great. I found a really nice podcast app (PodLP) to round out the music player and FM radio functions for entertainment. Snake is a ton of fun, too. I don't need to use Google Maps, browser, etc. but it's nice that they exist. A friend texted me a twitter link and I was able to load it up and it was fine. Google Maps worked correctly and quickly when I tested it but I have built-in nav in my car so I haven't had a legit use case for it. All in all, it's a dumbphone with smart enough features and enough entertainment apps to not feel a total void the way you might with something like a TCL Classic. Battery life is spectacular, build quality is good, the interface and KaiOS are super easy to learn and navigate, and it is good enough at everything to where you don't feel too bad ditching your smartphone.
Top critical review
109 people found this helpful
Unfit for purpose
By Adrian Mccarthy on Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2024
This isn't really a basic "feature" phone. KaiOS is a stripped down version of Android running on a little processor that isn't capable of keeping up with the demands of Android bloat. For example, open the phone, and in big numerals it will show you the time _that you last opened the phone_. It may take up to a minute to update and show the actual time. (You can train yourself you read the actual time on the tiny status bar.) Sending a text message? Type slowly because it won't keep up. (And good luck finding basic punctuation marks like the apostrophe or capitalizing a name in the middle of a sentence. And your preferences for which text typing mode you like are constantly being reset to bad defaults.) The UI is unnecessarily cumbersome. If you receive a spam text (aren't they all?), you're going to have to press a lot of buttons several times to delete it. I don't have a data plan because all I need is the occasional call and even rarer SMS message. But if this phone ever gets access to data for even a moment, it starts trying to update. And when that data is interrupted, your notifications will be spammed with a slew of error messages. And, sometimes, that leaves key apps, like your contact list, inaccessible. The beauty of Type C USB connectors is that you can insert them either way. However, if your charger and cable support PD (Power Delivery) and/or QC (Quick Charge), the phone will charge only when the cable is plugged in the "right" way. If you leave it overnight on a charger with the cable the wrong way around, you'll wake up to a dead battery. From what I've read, you have to go out of your way to design a Type C USB port that isn't symmetric. But why would you do that? (And the battery life is terrible compared to previous feature phones I've had. Putting Android under the hood may have been an expedient way to create KaiOS, but you can't throw that at a low power processor and expect it not to burn through the battery.) Oh, I almost forgot about Bluetooth. This phone fails to pair with my car. My car thinks the pairing is successful, but the phone does not. This phone does pair with my wife's car, but not mine. Every other phone I've used was able to pair with both cars. I don't have a great need for a cell phone (coverage at home is spotty at best), so I haven't gone looking for an alternative. Yesterday, however, the phone died, a just few days short of 10 months of very light usage. Outer screen won't light up. Inner screen is filled with random pixel values. If I call it, it doesn't even ring, so it's not _just_ a display failure. This device doesn't reach even the most minimal requirements of a cell phone. If Nokia still cared one iota about its brand name, it never would have authorized this disaster. It's actually worse that the Kazuna eTalk, which I wouldn't have imagined was possible. This is not fit to be called a phone.
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