So what caused this crazy growth in feature phone shipments?
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Microsoft previously hoped that feature phone users would create a Microsoft account and become part of the Microsoft ecosystem, but it's not clear whether the millions of feature phone users ever actually did that.
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Lastly, there's the Nokia 210, a proper, classic Nokia feature phone.
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So yeah, it's a feature phone, but an extremely hot one.
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"There is a huge population of feature phone loyalists," Sarvikas said.
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You can buy a 4G feature phone from other companies for cheaper.
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How do you build a website for PC on a feature phone?
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Amid these announcements, people weren't expecting a new feature phone from the company.
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The feature phone trend is not one that seems to be going away.
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Where a traditional feature phone can't call you a Lyft, the Palm phone can.
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The reimagined Nokia 3310 is a feature phone and has the classic game "Snake" installed.
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Being particularly dumb for a dumb feature phone, I predict they will sell almost none.
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"A lot of people have a feature phone but really want a smartphone," he says.
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For the experiment, I used an MP01, a feature phone made by Swiss company Punkt.
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The new security features also apply to WhatsApp's Windows Phone, BlackBerry and feature phone apps.
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Prior to that, she had a feature phone capable of texting and not much else.
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It has a slider that is similar to the one on the original feature phone.
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HMD Global has announced the Nokia 106, an affordable feature phone destined for the global market.
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In fact, according to TechCrunch, feature phone sales are growing faster than smartphone sales right now.
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In a surprise announcement this morning, the software giant unveiled its latest Nokia 216 feature phone.
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The recovery will mainly be driven by "feature phone" owners upgrading to better devices, Kang says.
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They will have to also launch a 4G feature phone to arrest any churn of decline.
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Last week, Microsoft sold off the feature phone business of Nokia to Foxconn for $350 million.
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Feature phone based student learning company Eneza Education has scaled in Kenya and expanded to Ghana.
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Here it is: The internet giant splashed $22 million on a feature phone operating system called KaiOS.
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Microsoft is selling its feature phone business to FIH Mobile, a subsidiary of Foxconn, for $350 million.
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There are over 63 million mobile phone users, of whom 450 million still use a feature phone.
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But this year, Microsoft sold its Nokia-feature phone business to a new company called HMD Global.
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However, last year the company invested $22 million in KaiOS, an alternative feature phone operating system based on the discontinued Firefox OS. KaiOS's website lists most of the major apps seen in the leaked video of Google's feature phone OS, including Google Maps, YouTube, Facebook, and the Google Assistant.
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With KaiOS already offering access to Google's apps and services on feature phones, Google could have reasoned that it had little to gain from developing a feature phone operating system of its own, meaning this video might be the closest we get to a true Android feature phone OS.
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In the U.S., roughly 15 percent to 18 percent of the mobile market still uses a feature phone.
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The feature phone market in India remains larger than the smartphone market in India, Frost & Sullivan's Lele said.
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Compared to India's 260 million smartphone users, there are about 460 million feature phone users in the country.
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As part of that, FIH — a subsidiary of manufacturing giant Foxconn — acquired Nokia's feature phone business from Microsoft.
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Around 4 percent have downgraded their mobile package, while 3 percent swapped a smartphone for a feature phone.
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The cool-looking feature phone takes us away from apps as it allows nothing more than texting and calling.
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But a smartphone makes them much easier, raising another tension: between feature-phone-based services and internet-enabled phones.
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Microsoft has announced that it's selling its feature phone division to Foxconn for the princely sum of $350 million.
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It will reportedly be a feature phone, meaning it will have limited web browsing and other data-enabled capabilities.
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You can read the full memo below: Team, Last week we announced the sale of our feature phone business.
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According to Counterpoint, there are 1.3 billion feature phone users globally, mostly from emerging markets in Asia and Africa.
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Another feature phone HMD is launching is the Nokia 800 Tough, which it said will have "military grade" protection.
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Seiche said the Nokia range would serve users, particularly in emerging markets, from feature phone to mid-market devices.
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Last week, Microsoft announced separately that it was selling what was left of its low-end "feature phone" business.
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In 22018, Good was bought by Motorola, the onetime feature phone giant whose reign was under siege from smartphone makers.
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And it gets more interesting: Recent reports say feature phone sales are growing much faster than smartphone sales right now.
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WhatsApp hits India's Jio feature phones amidst fake news violence There's a new feature-phone version of WhatsApp for India.
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This deal will only affect Microsoft's feature phone business, which is currently still using the Nokia brand for basic phones.
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After selling off its feature phone business last week, Microsoft is now streamlining its Windows Phone hardware plans once again.
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The star of the show, without any doubt, was Nokia's reboot of the legendary, near-unbreakable Nokia 3310 feature phone.
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Although cumbersome, electronic payments are possible on a feature phone, and some such phones have cameras that can read QR codes.
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There's no word on pricing, but if it's anything like Microsoft's feature phone from 2015, the price could be really attractive.
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Money aside, it's not a surprising move considering Microsoft has been winding down its feature phone business for nearly two years.
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Microsoft's mobile business is winding down Microsoft has been winding down its feature phone business over the past couple of years.
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HMD says the battery lasts "from sunrise to sunset with one charge," which is something I'd honestly expect from a feature phone.
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Soon after announcing the sale of Nokia's feature phone business, Microsoft said it would further cut 2,000 jobs in the phone division.
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A candy bar feature phone whose main selling point is its ability to play Snake, eclipsing BlackBerry's own nostalgia-themed KeyOne smartphone.
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In 2015, Israeli researchers demonstrated how to hack an air-gapped computer using a GSM network, electromagnetic waves, and a feature phone.
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That rapid rise owed to a few key things: price, familiar branding and its predecessor's long time commitment to the feature phone.
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Today there are some 1.5 billion feature phone users, an interesting number to consider as smartphone sales continue to feel the crunch.
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Google's KaiOS investment could be seen as a way of introducing its services to feature phone users who might eventually graduate to smartphones.
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That device was just a multi-touch feature phone with a few Apple utilities until it became everything with the App Store launch.
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Image: MicrosoftMicrosoft might be selling off its feature phone division, but that hasn't stopped the company from announcing the Nokia 216 dumb phone.
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But Qualcomm, which holds the tentpole position in high-end smartphone markets, continues to struggle in entry-level smartphones and feature phone markets.
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This is the second feature phone that HMD has announced since picking up the licensing deal with Nokia for feature and smart phones.
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"With a leading position in the feature phone market already, HMD has a significant global foothold ...from day one," HMD said in a statement.
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But since Microsoft's deal with FIH Mobile hasn't closed yet, the company continues to run its feature phone business, and release new feature phones.
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Second, Google is expanding what the Assistant can do in KaiOS, a feature phone platform that has been picking up steam in developing markets.
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At the time, Facebook's emerging markets team consisted of one product manager, Kelly MacLean, who still runs the team, and offered feature phone targeting.
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That's an impressive number for the feature phone market which is still holding on strong despite smartphones taking over the majority of phone sales.
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But they may struggle to afford even a simple feature phone, and the illiterate and innumerate especially may find using it daunting at first.
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Earlier this morning, we found out that Microsoft was selling its feature phone business, branded using Nokia's name, to a Foxconn subsidiary, FIH Mobile.
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HMD struck gold last year reviving the legendary Nokia 2150 feature phone with a revamped model with color screen and the beloved game Snake!
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Among other devices the firm will be unveiling are the Nokia 6.2 and 7.2 smartphones, and a new feature phone called the Nokia 110.
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M-PESA was designed for a simple feature phone, working from a text menu of options (though it is now also available as an app).
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HMD took over the Nokia feature phone business from Microsoft in 2016 and struck a deal with Nokia Oyj to use the brand on smartphones.
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The entry-level smartphone is targeted at the Indian market and looks intended to woo feature phone owners to upgrade from a more basic mobile.
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As Microsoft continues to adjust its phone plans, the company announced today that it is selling its feature phone business to Foxconn for $350 million.
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To woo customers to Jio's network, Reliance in July launched a $264.9100 phone that blurs the lines between a smartphone and a basic feature phone.
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All three will be rolled out globally in Q23 in this year, Nokia said, alongside a retro feature phone (which you can read about here).
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What is different this year is that this a 4G feature phone and that will be important in terms of getting operators to support it.
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You can technically do all these things, but I want to stress that the novelty of doing them on a feature phone wears thin really quickly.
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A week after selling off its feature phone division, Microsoft has announced that it's also "streamlining" its smartphone hardware business, cutting 1,850 jobs in the process.
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The introduction of a 4G feature phone by Reliance Jio, the telco that has caused the biggest disruption in the Indian telecom space in several years.
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The device is a nod to the company's pre-smartphone existence, a candy bar feature phone that boasts Snake as one of its biggest selling points.
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The feature phone sports dual-SIM card capability, offers up to 2450 days of standby time on a single charge, and is priced at Rs 2,495 ($37).
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Software-wise, it runs KaiOS, a feature-filled feature phone operating system that adds modern amenities like Google, Google Maps, WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook, and Google Assistant integration.
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Today MobiKwik announced a 'Lite' version of its Android app that merchants can install on their phones and cater to even those users who rock a feature phone.
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Microsoft is selling the feature phone business it acquired from Nokia back in 2013 to a subsidiary of Taiwan-headquartered manufacturer Foxconn for $350 million, it announced today.
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It's a little hard to review a feature phone like the Nokia 22720 Flip, because it's so obviously not trying to compete with any smartphone on the market.
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Feature phone owners staying with dumbphones rather than upgrading to a smartphone was one of the reasons cited to explain the drop in sales in the holiday quarter.
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However, there is also scope for holding on to these users even as they stay in the feature phone category, which continues to evolve and become more functional.
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I am using a Linux laptop made by a company named Purism and a Nokia feature phone on which I am relearning the lost art of T9 texting.
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Microsoft also said it expects to finish its acquisition of LinkedIn and the sale of its entry-level feature phone business in the second quarter of fiscal 2017.
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Nadella backed Microsoft away from mobile hardware by selling off the feature phone business it picked up with the 2013 acquisition of the Nokia devices and services business.
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Still, even though the Light Phone 2 is still sort of a work in progress, it's delightful to use—it's like a feature phone mixed with a Kindle.
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Both phones made a big splash during preview events, only for people to suddenly realize that actually using a feature phone in the age of the smartphone is hard.
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The company also said it expects to finish its acquisition of LinkedIn and the sale of its entry-level feature phone business in the second quarter of fiscal 7353.
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HMD, along with a unit of China's Foxconn, will pay Microsoft $350 million to acquire the feature phone business, including its distribution channels and a Vietnam-based manufacturing facility.
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Despite announcing plans to sell its feature phone business to FIH Mobile, a subsidiary of Foxconn, for $350 million earlier this year, Microsoft is still launching new Nokia phones.
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So as not to limit the market to people who can afford smartphones, Jio also launched its own 2700G feature-phone, the JioPhone, which it says is "effectively free".
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Today it launched a feature phone version of WhatsApp for JioPhone 1 and 2's KaiOS, which are designed to support 22 of India's vast array of native languages.
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Despite announcing plans to sell its feature phone business to FIH Mobile, a subsidiary of Foxconn, for $350 million earlier this year, Microsoft is still launching new Nokia phones.
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Of course, you'll be doing all this on a pretty limited piece of hardware, although that's probably what you're looking for if you're buying a feature phone like these.
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In May of this year, MS dumped the feature phone side of the business, citing flagging sales, and manufacturing giant Foxconn was there to snap it up for $350 million.
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The announcement today comes as a surprise, especially since Microsoft announced earlier this year that it was selling its feature phone business to Foxconn's subsidiary, FIH Mobile for $350 million.
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The deal will see Microsoft transfer all of its feature phone assets, including brands, software and services, customer contracts and supply agreements to Foxconn subsidiary FIH Mobile to HMD Global.
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In 2015, the original co-founders Andreas Gala and Jorge Selva began developing a minimalist feature phone device called Minium, in response to their concerns with today's always-on culture.
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The handset will ship with a color display and have feature phone capabilities, according to information from Chinese site Vtech, which claims to have leaked information about the upcoming handset.
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Microsoft's "streamlining" of its smartphone business comes just a week after the company announced it's selling its feature phone business to FIH Mobile, a subsidiary of Foxconn, for $350 million.
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The hard numbers didn't add up either: the company couldn't turn a profit even at $150 per phone, which is at least twice the price of a respectable feature phone.
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"Our target customers are Indians who are buying their first smartphone, or people who are upgrading to their first smartphone from a feature phone," he told me in a phone interview.
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But, it also does have Snake, physical keys, a removable 1,020mAh battery, an FM radio, and even an app store (for apps designed for Nokia's proprietary, Java-based feature phone OS).
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It might be a more elegant solution to having a "time well-spent" phone than picking up a plain Jane feature phone or backing a Kickstarter for an in-betweener phone.
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Its foray into phone hardware hasn't been a huge success so far, but maybe jettisoning the feature phone wing will allow it double down on the smartphones it clings to. Maybe.
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In fact, since Foxconn is expected to buy the Nokia feature phone business from Microsoft by the end of the year, this could be the last Nokia phone Microsoft ever sells.
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Two years before the launch of the iPhone, I gave a talk about mobile phone gaming and showed the audience a motorcycle racing game running on an old Samsung feature phone.
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HMD, set up by former Nokia executives, took over the Nokia feature phone business from Microsoft in 2016 and struck a deal with Nokia Oyj to use the brand on smartphones.
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Microsoft's feature phone business sale and a reduction of Lumia production and sales leaves it up to other phone makers to help try and push Windows Phone in the right direction.
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Forty million JioPhone 103s had already been sold, and it's been estimated to control 27 percent of the Indian mobile phone market and 47 percent of the country's feature phone market.
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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.
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With or without an account, it is possible to write posts and follow other Twitter users over S.M.S. text on a feature phone that has texting capability and a data plan.
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The backstory to this phone is that alongside HMD acquiring the right to use Nokia licensing for its smartphones, it also acquired Nokia's old feature phone business from Microsoft for $350 million.
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As you'd expect for a feature phone, the Nokia 2720 Flip has longer battery life than most smartphones, although I'd be lying if I said I hadn't expected slightly more from it.
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A crossover between an antique Nokia-style feature phone (these still make up most new handsets sold in India) and a smartphone, the device is bound to appeal to Antilia's security guards.
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It runs Android as a base, yes, but KDDI says the software atop it has been designed from a feature-phone perspective, and the Infobar XV has the physical buttons to match.
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The deal will see 4,500 employees transfer over to Foxconn's subsidiary, and Microsoft handing over the rights to use the Nokia brand, feature phone software, services, and other contracts and supply agreements.
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Jio, which turned a profit within a year of its launch, recently flagged an upgrade of its feature phone and said it aims to have 63 million users as quickly as possible.
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Despite announcing plans to sell its feature phone... A remote vulnerability for Tesla's Model S has been demonstrated by researchers from Keen Security Lab, a division of the Chinese internet giant Tencent.
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Some folks might want it for the nostalgia factor, some might want it for the price, and in some markets, it simply might be what it is: a cheap, solid feature phone.
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Most non-smartphone owners in our panel have owned their current feature phone for three or four years, and said they have no intention of replacing it for another two or three years.
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Today, it unveiled the 513, a small "candy bar" feature phone that is a reimagining of one of the classic Nokia handsets from its heyday as the king of the mobile phone industry.
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In essence, Google's lowest common denominator is gradually shifting lower, as the company looks to scoop up every last feature phone holdout while at the same time matching the accessibility of Apple's iOS.
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Another reminder of the smartphone business's maturity was that the most talked-about new device was the Nokia 3310 feature phone (pictured), an updated version of a phone first made 17 years ago.
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Microsoft revealed its plans to sell its feature phone business to a Foxconn subsidiary for $350 million last week, and the company hinted that we might have seen the last Lumia-branded smartphone.
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HMD also said that it has conditionally agreed to acquire the rights to use the Nokia trademark on feature phones from Microsoft until 2024 and the design rights relating to Microsoft's feature phone business.
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In Africa, Transsion holds 54% of the feature phone market — through its brands Tecno, Infinix and Itel — and in smartphone sales is second to Samsung and before Huawei, according to International Data Corporation stats.
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The Jio Phone captured nearly 36 percent of the feature phone market in India in Q1 2018, which, to reiterate, is still bigger than the smartphone market in India in terms of pure volume.
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By this time, millions of people in India were on the internet and, with tens of millions of people owning a feature phone, the conditions of the market had begun to shift towards digital.
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In Africa, Transsion holds 54% of the feature phone market — through its brands Tecno, Infinix and Itel — and in smartphone sales is second to Samsung and before Huawei, according to International Data Corporation stats.
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"Just as with the very popular Motorola RAZR devices back in the feature phone era, we see foldable screens as a compelling form factor," Goldman analyst Rod Hall said in a note on Thursday.
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WeFarm founder and CEO, Kenny Ewan, says, crowdsourcing information "unlocks generations' worth of grassroots knowledge, ideas, and experience among farmers," and is far more efficient than using mobile apps in mainly feature-phone-led regions.
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"In our royalty business, the market experienced excess channel inventory in the low tier smartphone and feature phone markets, which resulted in weaker than expected baseband shipments in the first quarter," CEO Gideon Wertheizer said.
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As a late Friday coda to this week's news of Nokia's old feature phone business getting sold once again, today Nokia quietly confirmed it is laying off 1,032 employees in its home market of Finland.
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"What sets Sailfish OS apart from its competitors in the feature phone segment is the capability to do low-spec hardware configurations and still run selected Android apps," said CEO Sami Pienimäki in a statement.
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In Africa, Transsion holds 54% of the feature phone market — through its brands Tecno, Infinix and Itel — and in smartphone sales is second to Samsung and ahead of Huawei, according to International Data Corporation stats.
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And carrying a feature phone these days is sort of like taking a horse-and-buggy ride — it's a fun thing to try out, but sooner or later you've got to get back on the road.
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For the person who still chooses to use a feature phone in 2016 — an admittedly dwindling market — Verizon sells an unlimited talk, text, and mobile web plan for what feels like an exorbitant $30 a month.
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So ftcash allows any merchant with a feature phone and a bank account to accept a variety of cashless payments — including credit cards, debit cards, mobile wallets and PayPal — after just a few minutes of setup.
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HMD said it will invest over $500 million over the next three years "to support the global marketing of Nokia-branded mobile phones and tablets, funded via its investors and profits from the acquired feature phone business".
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Once all the deals close, HMD will be run by Arto Nummela, who is running the Microsoft feature phone business and serving as overall head of Microsoft's mobile devices business in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
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The Redmi Go also looks intended to respond to local carrier Reliance Jio's 4G feature phones, which are positioned — price and feature wise — as a transitionary device, sitting between a dumber feature phone and full-fat smartphone.
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Next week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona will feature phone companies in various stages of acceptance that the industry's predictable, decades-old business model based on selling data packages by the millions is running out of steam.
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Ted McCarthy, a Google user experience researcher, was in Jodhpur on Sunday and Monday to gather feedback on Datally and another app, a voice-controlled virtual assistant that is made to work on a $23 feature phone.
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As the rate of smartphone sales continues to slow down and decline, a software startup called KaiOS — which launched in 503 from the ashes of Mozilla's failed Firefox OS mobile project as a provider of an internet-based feature phone OS, feature phone apps, and corresponding HTML5 app store that all work over advanced mobile data networks — is betting that there is still a big, lucrative market for cheaper, lower-end feature phones, and it's announcing a slew of news this week on the road to leading it.
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Microsoft may have cut short its Windows Phone and mobile efforts, and it may be in the process of selling its feature phone business, but the company is anything but done with launching new feature phones with Nokia branding.
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That growth comes thanks in part to its out of the gate brand recognition from acquiring Nokia IP, some buzzy early retro handsets, a focus on budget devices and its continued commitment to the oft-neglected feature phone market.
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HMD is also announcing the $0203 Nokia 1 Plus, which is meant to improve upon last year's Nokia 1 as a sort of entry-level smartphone for folks looking to upgrade from a feature phone for the first time.
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The new company, HMD global, is acquiring from Nokia a 10-year license to use that brand on phones and tablets, as well as acquiring from Microsoft that company's feature phone unit, which has also carried the Nokia brand.
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And if you still have someone using a basic cellphone on your plan, it's probably best to avoid unlimited: adding a feature phone to the account costs $25 extra per month, compared to just $15 on the standard plans.
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Here's Myerson's full memo to Microsoft employees: To: Microsoft - All Employees From: Terry Myerson Date: Wednesday 5/25, 2AM Pacific Time Subject: Focusing our phone hardware efforts Team, Last week we announced the sale of our feature phone business.
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It attributed the drop to two main factors: fewer feature phone owners upgrading to smartphones because of the lack of quality "ultra-low-cost" smartphones, and current smartphone owners deciding to buy and keep quality devices for longer periods of time.
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Unlike a dumb feature phone or other gadgets that attempt to fight Internet-driven FOMO, the Palm runs a full mobile OS (Android 8) with a custom home screen/app launcher designed to be easy to use on a tiny display.
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Microsoft is selling its feature phone assets to a subsidiary of Taiwanese firm Foxconn Technology and newly-established firm HMD Global for $350 million, the company announced on Wednesday, in a move that will see Nokia devices return to the market.
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It was widely leaked ahead of time, but the relaunch of the Nokia 29 feature phone has been the biggest story to come out of Mobile World Congress, the world's most important smartphone trade show, taking place in Barcelona this week.
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The research firm estimates that a more broad uptick in feature phone buying, fueled no doubt by Jio's huge numbers and HMD Nokia, led to Android-based smartphone shipments declining 14 percent year-on-year in that same Q1 2018 period.
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"The low-cost JioPhone will place pressure on Indian feature phone leaders such as Samsung, Intex and Lava, and make life harder for ambitious new entrants like HMD," said Neil Mawston, an executive director at tech research firm Strategy Analytics.
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To make that happen, Foxconn, which put up most of the cash, and HMD Global, a private-equity-backed Finnish group led by former Microsoft and Nokia executives, agreed to buy Microsoft's so-called feature phone unit for $350 million.
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While Android and iOS have locked up the market for smartphone operating systems, a feature phone platform that has the distinction of being the world's third biggest mobile OS is announcing a hefty round of funding to continue its expansion.
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Additionally, all three have been updated to work on modern 4G cell networks, so you won't have to worry about not being able to get a signal like you would if you dug out an old feature phone from your closet.
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The original Shuffle, about the size of a half-empty pack of gum, and glossy white; the only iPod I would ever own, until I bought an iPhone in 2011, out of shame for using a feature phone while blogging about tech.
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With the Apple deal at the high end of the spectrum, Jio is also working to woo cost-conscious aspirational smartphone buyers at the lower end with a $23 4G phone that blurs the line between a smartphone and a traditional feature phone.
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Google is investing $22 million into KaiOS, the feature phone operating system that has risen from the ashes of Mozilla's Firefox OS. While Google rules the smartphone world with Android, KaiOS is slowly emerging as a popular choice for feature phones, particularly in emerging markets.
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That's the case not just in emerging markets — but, as it turns out, in developed markets, where a feature phone either exists as a "back up" for a smartphone owner, or as a pared-down and smaller device that is simply easier to use.
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It also refreshed its devices in the mid-market, where it already has a top-five ranking in many markets, and introduced a feature phone - the Nokia 210 - able to connect to the Internet using an Opera Mini browser, priced at an average $35.
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"Java was there first," he said over and over, emphasizing the use of Java in feature phone operating systems like SavaJe and Danger and claiming that, prior to the introduction of Android to the market in 2008, almost all smartphones were running some form of Java.
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In February, KaiOS announced that it would be adding Google Search, Google Maps and the Google Voice Assistant to the new Nokia 8110 feature phone, and it seems that this is the Google agreement that will be expanded to all models as part of Google's investment.
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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).
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BARCELONA, Feb 25 (Reuters) - Seeking to capitalise on a remarkable comeback over the past year, Nokia phones are expanding to include their first premium Android smartphone model, as well as a remake of one of its biggest hits of the 1990s, the 8110 "slider" feature phone.
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Analysts warn all the fuss HMD has made over its gimmicky 3310 could make people forget it makes smartphones, too: "The launch of the new reimagined Nokia 3310 feature phone threatens to overshadow HMD's modern smartphones," IHS lead mobile analyst Ian Fogg told VICE News in an email.
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When I told them that even $250 was a lot for what amounted to a feature phone, they agreed but said that manufacturing at their scale was unavoidably expensive: they'd spent a couple million dollars on their hardware team in China and a couple million more on software development.
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Today, the company took its latest step in rebuilding itself as it unveiled a slate of Android-powered smartphones — the Nokia 2793, the Nokia 6, Nokia 7 Plus and Nokia 8 Sirocco, with the cheapest of these, the Nokia 1, coming in at a mere $85 — and a new feature phone.
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"If you look now at the population, 45 percent of the devices we have been selling across the MEA region were smartphones so 55 percent of the population are still using a feature phone," Yves Maitre, executive vice president of connected objects and partnerships at Orange, told CNBC by phone.
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They just buy local models that aren't that durable, very clumsy devices, so we try to deliver very low-end products that capture the user who's using smartphones for the first time in their life so that they can make a bridge from the feature phone to the real smartphone.
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The churn of the yearly upgrade cycles and the flood of me-too handsets seems to have hit a breaking point, so much so that the solid gimmick of reviving a feature phone nearly old enough to vote in the US overshadowed a handful of the year's biggest smartphone announcements.
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" Shah added that, "for Apple in India, their cheapest phone starts from US$450 ... (the trend) is a blessing in disguise for Apple as these laggard 2G feature phone users will rapidly get used to 4G networks and will itch for a better phone when they upgrade in next two years.
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But in 2019 that's no longer the case, and as much as I hate to say it, I just don't think it's possible to opt out of the smartphone era anymore once you've embraced it, and that makes relying on a feature phone like the Nokia 2720 Flip a pretty isolating experience.
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Earlier this year, Microsoft sold off its remaining feature phone business, helping to create HMD Global, a Finnish company devoted to returning the once mighty Nokia name to the market – another strange twist in a saga that began a century and a half ago in the form of a paper pulping mill.
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After having forced the competition to follow its lead in offering free voice calls across all plans and reducing data rates to a fraction of what they used to be, Jio last year introduced a feature phone that packed many features offered by entry-level smartphones but at a fraction of the price.
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But it turns out, while Microsoft did buy Nokia's mobile devices division for $7.2 billion in 2014, it sold Nokia's "feature phone assets" two years later for a painful write-down, $350 million, to Foxconn (of Apple outsourcing fame) and to HMD Global, a Finnish firm helmed by a former Nokia executive.
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But industry executives and analysts say Jio's crossover feature phone - not quite a smartphone, not quite a no-frills handset - could, in fact, be a boon to the lower end of the market and suppliers that feed it, creating a new in-between category and getting more people online for the first time.
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As part of the Microsoft feature phone sale deal, Microsoft noted that some 4,500 employees will transfer to, or have the opportunity to join, FIH Mobile or HMD Global — shedding what is likely the remaining rump of Nokia staff Microsoft originally acquired (after prior job cuts as it was unable to move the needle on mobile device sales).
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Up to now, the feature phone startup has made small revenues from licensing, said Codeville, but the business model for KaiOS is mostly focused around revenues from its app store, and soon from what it hopes will be a lot of advertising around content and apps that people use through the KaiOS browser, in the form of KaiAds.
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The company said its 4,500 employees from Vietnam will transfer to or will have an opportunity to join FIH Mobile or HMD Global Oy. Microsoft will transfer all of its feature phone assets, including brands, software and services, care network and other assets, customer contracts, and critical supply agreements to both the companies as a part of the deal.
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Nokia is rumored to be resurrecting its classic 3310 mobile phone at MWC, but also reportedly plans to unveil some mid-tier Android smartphones for consumers who want something more than an invincible feature phone that can play Snake II. This is all part of Nokia's comeback under HMD Global — but the company must find other ways to stand out beyond just hardware.
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Where Silicon Valley Is Going to Get in Touch With Its SoulNew Facebook App for Children Ignites Debate Among FamiliesBroadcom Proposes Unseating Qualcomm Board as Takeover Fight Escalates Ted McCarthy, a Google user experience researcher, was in Jodhpur on Sunday and Monday to gather feedback on Datally and another app, a voice-controlled virtual assistant that is made to work on a $23 feature phone.
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A 17-year-old Nokia phone is all anyone's talking about at Mobile World Congress A 17-year-old Nokia phone is all anyone's talking about at Mobile World Congress It was widely leaked ahead of time, but the relaunch of the Nokia 3310 feature phone has been the biggest story to come out of Mobile World Congress, the world's most important smartphone trade show, taking place in Barcelona this week.
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"And what we see in every single market over and over and over again is, as they get better, they get cheaper, and so those cell phones that were paid for by the wealthiest in the beginning were extraordinarily expensive and didn't work well and now you can buy a feature phone for under $40 and you can microfinance it and children of Tanzania have those phones," says Diamandis.
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Interestingly, this cohort tends to lean more Android if they had to choose a smartphone, and lean toward a similar brand of feature phone they previously had, like Samsung or LG. It intrigues me that price comes up as much as it does, given that it seems as if U.S. carriers are penalizing those who don't yet have smartphones by charging them more in various ways on their bill than consumers who do have smartphones.
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The feature phone business that it sold to a Foxconn-led consortium last week was never the primary interest for Microsoft, so it seemed like a very obvious move to finally pass it on to a group that was more interested in developing it and getting out what it could from the lower end of the market that is still buying these devices (which, interestingly, is still a pretty sizeable volume, if much lower value overall).
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In the document, Facebook lists four uses for people's information as being some of the purposes its integration partners had for the data — namely: Saying some partners built version of its app for their device, OS or product that "replicated essential Facebook features that we built directly on the Facebook website and in our mobile apps"; some built social networking 'hubs' — which aggregated messages from multiple social services; some built syncing integrations to enable people to sync their Facebook data with their device in order to integrate Facebook features on their device (such as to upload pictures to Facebook and to download their Facebook pictures to their phones, or to integrate their Facebook contacts into their address book); and some developed USSD services — to provide Facebook notifications and content via text message, such as for feature phone users without mobile Internet access.
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