Nokia 8110's slider 'Matrix' feature phone returns with 4G and a €79 price tag

Ingrid Lunden
Mozilla called it a day with Firefox OS for mobile handsets back in 2015 and said it would test the waters for an IoT effort using some of the same technology (and it has).

Nokia's 8110 -- the distinctive 'candy bar' feature phone with a slider opening -- was once the phone that everyone wanted but no one could afford, made popular through the Matrix film franchise. Now HMD, the company that has the license to make Nokia phones, is hoping for a hit by bringing it back. Today, at MWC in Barcelona, Nokia officially took the wraps off the new 8110 -- a new feature phone that will come with 4G connectivity and a selected group of apps such as Google's Assistant, Maps, and Search; as well as Facebook and Twitter (and yes, Snake). It also comes with a battery life befitting of feature phones: 17 days, with 9 days of talk time. The 8110 comes in "banana yellow" (in keeping with its "banana" curved design) and black.

This is the second feature phone that HMD has announced since picking up the licensing deal with Nokia for feature and smart phones. The first, the 3310, has been a big hit for HMD. The company told TechCrunch that it is currently the leading handset maker in the feature phone category, part of a bigger milestone, selling 70 million devices overall in 2017. That figure includes both feature and smart phones; and while the company does not break out specific models or categories publicly, it described feature phones to TechCrunch as the "bigger runner" within that number.

"This gives us a responsibility to innovate in this part of the business, to bring something new to consider in feature phones going forward," said Pekka Rantala, EVP and CMO of HMD Global said in an interview. "It was very clear that we needed to be able to deliver and keep the Nokia promise when it comes to quality, reliability and ease of use."

Juho Sarvikas, CPO of HMD Global, described the 8110 as a "vacation" phone when people might want to switch off from being continuously connected. And indeed, this has found a counterpart in Silicon Valley, where has been a big wave of thought among tech people who now believe that the continuous connectivity of smartphone life has detrimental effects.

"There is a huge population of feature phone loyalists," Sarvikas said. "We see a lot of potential in innovating in the feature phone space, not a simple redesign of the [older] 2G experience."

As with the previous iteration of the 8110 from many years back, the slide feature is used to answer and hang up on calls, along with voice-over-LTE calling, an app store and a Qualcomm 205 processor.

Full specs below.

  • 2G: 900/1800, 3G: WB-CDMA 1/5/8/39, 4G: FDD-LTE 1/3/5/7/8/20, TDD-LTE 39/40/41/(38)

  • OS: Smart Feature OS

  • Chipset: Qualcomm® 205 Mobile Platform (MSM8905 Dual Core 1.1 GHz)

  • RAM: 512MB LPDDR3

  • Storage: 4GB eMMC internal memory4

  • Display: 2.4-inch QVGA display, curved display

  • Camera: 2MP rear camera

  • Connectivity/Sensors: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, BT 4.1, GPS/AGPS, micro USB 2.0, 3.5mm AV jack

  • Battery2: 1500mAh

  • FM radio

  • Audio playback file formats: AAC, AMR, MP3, MIDI, Vorbis

  • Micro SIM slot