Today Nokia has announced the X1-00, a device that’s aimed at the ultra low end of the market. It’s going to cost roughly $50 when it comes out in Q2 of this year and what makes it special is the gargantuan speaker on the back. It’s rated at 106 phon, which doesn’t mean anything to us since we’re used to using decibels to measure noise, but Nokia says that it’s enough to rattle windows. The massive 1320 mAh battery gives this thing over 60 days of standby time, 13 hours of talk time, and 38 hours of music playback, which we assume means via the headphones. Speaking of headphones, this thing has a standard 3.5 mm jack.
The X1-00 plays MP3 files, can support a microSD card up to 16 GB in size, and has a built in FM radio. That’s about it. There’s no camera, no internet browsing, nothing. This is a pure talk, text, pass the time with over the air radio, handset. Don’t even think about putting apps on this thing either, it’s running Series 30. The dimensions are 112.2 mm x 47.3 mm x 16 mm and it weighs a hair over 90 grams. It also comes with a built in flashlight, support for up to 5 address books should your family be so poor that you all need to share a single mobile phone, and … yea, this isn’t going to be something many of our readers are going to pick up.
That being said, this is the type of device that defines who Nokia is and what they do right. While everyone else is trying to come out with the next super phone to make geeks all around the world shit themselves, Nokia is thinking about the “next billion”, a phrase they coined that describes the people of this planet who have never experienced what owning a mobile phone is all about. They’ll love this thing.