Nokia announces 2780 Flip, a flip phone with 2.7″ screen and FM Radio function

Judging by this announcement, we might assume that we’re somewhere in the early 2000s, when Nokia was the market leader and was even launching clamshell phones with colour screens and FM radio function. But in 2022, the announcement of such a phone is unusual to say the least. HMD Global, the company that controls the Nokia brand in the mobile phone market, is announcing the new Nokia 2780 Flip, a phone seemingly from the past.

The Nokia 2780 Flip is a slightly more “grown up” feature phone

Of course, these “old-style” phones are nothing new for HMD Global. After the debut of Nokia’s Android phones, HMD managed to attract attention with “classic” models like the 3310, relaunched in the modern era. Of course, this internet hype has passed, but the company has continued to launch such phones.

Although on the outside we can see that we’re dealing with an “old-fashioned” phone, on the inside it incorporates relatively modern components. We have a 2.7″ screen on the inside and a 1.7″ screen on the outside, with a 5 megapixel fixed-focus camera and an LED flash. The phone integrates a Qualcomm 215 chipset (quad-core at 1.3 GHz) and benefits from a 4G modem at 150 Mbps and 802.11n Wi-Fi.

With 512 GB internal storage and 4 GB RAM, it could also run a Go version of Android without much trouble, but it’s developed on KaiOS 3.1. So instead of a rich app store, we get limited internal features like FM Radio, MP3 and WhatsApp playback, access to YouTube, Maps and other services in a limited version, and text input only via the T9 keyboard, no virtual one. In fact, the screen isn’t a touchscreen, so there wouldn’t be any other options anyway.

The 1,450 mAh battery can be removed and replaced by the user, something we haven’t seen on modern smartphones for many years. The phone launches at a price of $90 in two variants: red and blue.