This Phone Costs Half What My Dinner Cost

This week at Mobile World Congress, Nokia unveiled the Nokia 105. This small phone includes a flashlight and a battery that lasts for about a month on standby mode, with 12 full hours of talk time. And here’s the kicker, it will retail for only 15 Euros. This is the unsubsidized price, meaning it is unlocked and you are not being bound to a carrier agreement.

When you get a phone for “free” you are typically bound to a 1–2 year service agreement because the carrier is paying part of (most of?) the cost of the phone. So in effect, these “cheap” phones are not all that cheap. The Nokia 105 on the other hand is genuinely, truly, remarkably inexpensive.

So what’s the catch?

This is certainly not a smartphone. It doesn’t even come with a data capability or support for a data plan of any kind. You just get talk and SMS capabilities, plus a couple simple games and tools like a calculator.

Along with the FirefoxOS offering, this is clearly aimed at the developing world and getting (as the keynote was titled) the next 2 billion people onto mobile devices.