Nokia 8110 4G review

Display

The Nokia 8110 4G is equipped with a quite retro 2.4-inch, 240 x 320 pixel display. That sounds like a pretty low resolution and quite frankly, it is. Still, at this diagonal, it looks sharp, enough. We'll put it this way - if you manage to get text small enough to start noticing the lack of resolution, you've already gotten way beyond the point of usable font-size or UI.

Properly testing such a small panel and especially one sitting relatively far from the actual front glass turned out to be a bigger hassle than we originally anticipated. We've decided to skip on any precise brightness, contrast and sunlight legibility figures. We will note that, as best as we managed to measure, you can expect peek brightness levels of about 380 nits. Not ideal, but also not too bad, considering the panel size. Unfortunately, there is no automatic brightness adjustment.

The particular TFT unit HMD chose also suffers from some color shift. From a vertical alignment, the left and right angles aren't so bad. Tilting it back, to look at it from the bottom is not horrible either. However, only a few degrees of displacement in the other direction and colors practically disappear.

Battery

The Nokia 8110 4G has a 1,500 mah battery at its disposal - pretty measly by today's standards. However, it is also running a very weak Snapdragon 205 chipset, a tiny TFT display and fewer sensors than a modern smartphone. Plus, it has a pretty aggressive battery management policy, which practically shuts down any background data connectivity, by default.

This is probably a good call since KaiOS isn't really big on background services and tasks. For the most part, it's a single-tasking OS. Hence, once you turn the screen off, you really don't need any of those pesky wireless radios sucking up electricity. Hence, the up to 600 hours advertised stand-by rating for the device.

After some effort, we did manage to put the battery through our standard battery test routine. Although it should be noted that since getting a proper brightness reading from the display turned out to be impossible, we had to approximate to the typical 200 nits as best we could.

Since the Nokia 8110 4G doesn't really fall among regular smartphones, we won't be posting an overall endurance rating for it. This is mostly due to the widely varying nature of the standby time. The advertised, up to 600 hours, presumes a disabled Wi-Fi radio, which does take its toll quite noticeably when turned on since the battery pack is so small. In terms of 3G call testing, we managed to squeeze 10 hours and 43 minutes on a single charge. And offline video playback and the browser test managed to deplete the battery fully in 12 hours and 25 minutes and 10 hours, respectively.

Charging speeds on the Nokia 8110 4G are glacial. The bundled 550mAh wall adapter managed to bring the battery up from 0% to 63% in an hour. A full charge takes around 3 hours and 10 minutes. While that wouldn't be exceptionally bad for a modern smartphone, with a 3,000+ pack to fill up, it just seems unreasonable to wait that long on a 1,500 mAh one.

In case you were wondering, the low output of the stock charger is not to blame here. We tried hooking the Nokia 8110 4G up to a 5v@2.4A USB, as well as a QC3 one and a VoltIQ, just in case that made any difference. Regardless, it always drew 520mA from the wall. No more, no less. This is one area we feel HMD could invest some effort in and potentially bring customers a lot of added value, for a small cost overhead.

Loudspeaker

The Nokia 8110 4G only has a single rear-mounted speaker at its disposal. When we say rear, we literally mean its grill is situated around the center of the back, right underneath the removable panel. Some of the sounds seem to be channeled through the earpiece grill as well. But, we might be mistaken on that one, since it's kind of hard to say exactly where the loud, annoying shrieks are originating from.

Yes, the tiny speaker is extremely loud, but also very poor in quality. Almost every sound gets distorted. The only thing it really excels at is blasting high-pitched noises as a ringtone, to get your attention. Multimedia usage is a real let-down.

Audio quality

The Nokia 8110 4G delivered audio of average clarity and sub-par loudness when hooked to an active external amplifier.

Plugging in a pair of headphones left us with a moderate increase in stereo crosstalk and some extra intermodulation distortion, but the overall clarity remained good. Volume was once again disappointing, but we guess we shouldn't complain too much about a phone where playing the WAV sample file was considered a success.

Nokia 8110 4G frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.