Tech
Nokia’s new phone is an earbud-charging throwback to the MP3 player era
The Nokia 5710 XpressAudio has a slider design that houses your earbuds when they need a charge.
Nokia is well past its prime for making cellphones, but it’s still giving us some cool designs that we can, at the very least, appreciate. Nokia announced three phones and a tablet to its lineup, but the one that’s caught our eyes is the Nokia 5710 XpressAudio, which features an innovative slider design that opens up so it can house and charge its own earbuds.
Let’s be honest, smartphone design in the last few years has gotten a bit stale and repetitive. If you take a look at the recent top-selling smartphones, they all share similar elements of a wide screen, slim profile, and several cameras slapped onto the back. So it’s refreshing to see Nokia offer up a design that’s removed from the status quo and one that’s focused on music.
Remember MP3s — It’s clear Nokia wanted to infuse the soul of an MP3 player into the 5710 XpressAudio. It has media control buttons on both sides, including play/pause, next and previous tracks, and volume up and down buttons.
You’re going to have to go old-school here and port your own music into the 5710 XpressAudio, since it acts as an MP3 player. There’s no Spotify on this thing so you’ll have to recall the days when Kazaa and Limewire were the primary sources of music.
Beyond the built-in slot for earbuds, there’s not much else to differnitate the phone from other ultra-budget devices. It offers a 2.4-inch hot display and has a rear camera that can shoot 0.3-megapixel photos. That’s right, not even a full megapixel. Nokia built the 5710 XpressAudio with a Unisoc T107 chip, so its no Snapdragon processor, but it does have Snake and Tetris on it.
Depending on how much music you want to import, you might have to take advantage of the microSD card slot. There’s an internal storage of 128MB, but the microSD card can bring it up to a more modern capacity of 32GB. Unfortunately, the 5710 XpressAudio charges with a microUSB port, but at least it has a removable 1,450mAh battery that’s supposed to last around 20 days on standby and at least six hours for talk time.
Budget burner — Nokia will be releasing the 5710 XpressAudio in the U.K. for £75, or roughly $90, later this month. The phone will come in black and white, with both colorways having orange accents, but there’s no word on a U.S. release.
If it does come to the U.S., we’re not saying you have to throw away your iPhone or Galaxy S22 and jump on the Nokia train. We should, however, admire Nokia’s outside-the-box design. It’s such an outlandishly old-school and clunky design, but maybe that’s the kind of thinking we need to break away from the stale smartphone look we’re stuck with.