[News] The old clamshell phones continue to sweep Gen Z. This is excellent news for Nokia

[#Wittels-]

Sammy Palazzolo's friends constantly ask him to show them his phone. This 18-year-old student does it proud: it's a modest clamshell phone, a Cinclular Flex based on KaiOS 2.5.4, with a 2.8-inch screen and 2 MP camera. And like her, thousands of users are abandoning their smartphones to return to much more Spartan devices. Because?

Smartphone slaves. As indicated in The Wall Street Journal, for Palazzolo and his followers —now she is an evangelizer of this trend on her TikTok account— we are slaves to the phone, "like robots that do not stop scrolling, even when we are at a party." Now he takes his "dumb" phone with him to these meetings and leaves his iPhone at home.

Gen Z recovers old formats. This generation —born between the late 90s and 2010— takes advantage of the fact that these mobiles have many limitations in terms of applications. Therefore, they avoid distractions and that means they are not "glued to the mobile" as could happen with conventional smartphones. The trend already became apparent months ago, when Camila Cabello posted a message on Twitter stating that "I'm from the flip phone revolution team."

Long live the nostalgia. Nokia, which dominated the pre-iPhone era with an iron fist, has been able to take advantage of this trend. It has spent years keeping manufacturing phones simple ('featurephones') and in fact that has led it to play with nostalgia and reintroduce hits from the past to adapt them to new times.

Phones from before that seem (a bit) from now. Although things like the shell format, physical keyboards or small screens are preserved, these models have some important options such as 4G connectivity and, in some cases, somewhat more decent cameras. The KaiOS operating system allows access to a browser and applications such as WhatsApp, but not Instagram or TikTok, for example.

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Using a little of everything. The use of these devices is not usually exclusive to their users, who use them according to the occasion. In WSJ they commented how Osamah Qatanani, 23, carries both his iPhone and a basic clamshell phone and uses them more or less the same amount of time. When he carries the modest mobile, he affirms "nothing else arrives except the people who are important to you".

Great news for Nokia. The firm sent Palazzolo a Nokia 2780 Flip based on KaiOS 3.1, with a 2.7-inch screen and a 5 MP camera for him to test, plus another 44 to give to his friends and followers on his social networks. It has been one of the movements that reinforces a strategy that is giving results.

remarkable sales. According to the WSJ, Nokia sells tens of miles of its clamshell phones each month in the United States. The figures were given by Lars Silberbauer, head of marketing at HMD Global, the Finnish maker of Nokia handsets. Sales, he says, are growing in various regions, stressing that this is "no small trend."Anyone can afford them. These simple mobiles —also frequently used by our elders— have the advantage of being especially cheap. It is common to find them for just 60-80 euros, when a high-end smartphone is currently around 800 and 1,000 euros. And then there is its other advantage: the battery life is amazing.

 

Link: https://www.xataka.com/moviles/viejos-moviles-concha-siguen-arrasando-gen-z-excelentes-noticias-para-nokia