Nokia’s latest nostalgia-bait feature phone is the 8110 “Banana Phone”

Nokia revives the 8110, the phone made famous in The Matrix.

Ron Amadeo – Feb 25, 2018 11:45 am | 146

Neo gets a call on the original Nokia 8110. Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

The year is 1999. Computer programmer Thomas Anderson sits at his cubicle, contemplating the latest dressing down from his boss. His thoughts are interrupted when a delivery arrives. He rips open the FedEx package to reveal a loose, unboxed phone. The phone rings the second it is out of the package, and Anderson, shocked, stares at it a moment. He presses a button and the phone springs opens with a satisfying “click” noise. Anderson raises the phone to his ear: “Hello?”

“Hello Neo, do you know who this is?”

That phone was the Nokia 8110, which in the 1999 film The Matrix, allows Morpheus’ to remotely guide Neo through the office chase scene. After resurrecting the Nokia 3310 “Brick Phone” at last year’s Mobile World Congress, this year HMD’s updated nostalgia-bait feature phone is the Nokia 8110, AKA the “Banana Phone.”

Just like last year’s Nokia 3310, the new “Nokia 8110 4G” takes a classic Nokia design and updates it for this millennium. It’s still a cheap €79 ($97) feature phone though, so don’t expect to load a ton of apps on it. It doesn’t even run Android, instead it has a feature phone OS called “KaiOS”. Kai is a fork of the old Firefox OS, and uses HTML5 apps. You’re getting the bare minimum of apps here, like Google Assistant, Google Maps, Facebook, and, of course, the Snake game.

The 8110 earned the nickname “The Banana Phone” due to the curved shape and long silhouette when it is open. The 8110 was one of the first examples of a slider phone. When closed up, you only saw the earpiece, screen, a wide swath of plastic, and then the microphone. When it was time for a phone call though, you could slide down the big plastic chunk to reveal the keypad. Since the microphone was at the bottom of the slider piece, sliding the phone open also put the microphone closer to your mouth.

Despite what the scene in The Matrix shows, the original Nokia 8110 did not have a spring loaded slide. The instant open and sweet sound effect was a bit of movie magic, but shortly after the movie’s release, Nokia engineered a spring loaded slider into 8110’s successor, the 7110. While the new Nokia 8110 keeps the curved body and slider mechanism, the phone stays historically-accurate and doesn’t have a spring loaded slider. You have to manually open and close it.

Nokia’s official spec sheet says the phone has “Uniquely addictive tactile mechanics.” First opening and closing the slider will accept and end calls, making this one of the coolest ways out there to hang up after a call. Second, the spec sheet says the phone can “spin helicopter style on its axis.” Who needs a fidget spinner when you have a curved phone?

Speaking of the spec sheet, we’re looking at some very modest feature phone specs for the new 8110. You get a Qualcomm Snapdragon 205 SoC, a chip so slow we don’t even use it in smart watches. There’s two 1.1GHz Cortex A7 CPU cores, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, a 2MP rear camera, and 2.4-inch QVGA (320×240) display. For connectivity there’s LTE, 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, micro USB 2.0, a headphone jack, and FM radio. Powering all of this is a 1500mAh battery, which is small by smartphone standards, but this is just a feature phone, so Nokia says it’ll all work out to 25 days of standby time and 9-ish hours of calls.

Nokia wouldn’t talk about country launch specifics, but there two variants of the 8110 4G labeled “Europe” and “MENA (Middle East and North Africa) and China,” so launches in those territories seem likely. Neither model has LTE bands that would work in the US. The phone is available in two colors: “Traditional Black” (à la The Matrix) and “Banana Yellow.” It launches in May.

Update: There’s some confusion around what CPU is in the Snapdragon 205. Qualcomm’s website says it uses two ARM Cortex A53s. A previous report from Anandtech says it has two Cortex A7 CPUs. I will try to get ahold of someone at Qualcomm.

Update 2: Qualcomm’s website was wrong and has been corrected. The Snapdragon 205 has two A7 cores. Those are positively ancient, but hey, it’s just a feature phone.