Nokia N8 Apps

[Rolan Sacco]

Igot a Nokia 6.1 for my son in an effort to get him out of the Apple world. One of the big advantages for him was the ability to store Netflix videos and large games in his SD card enabling him to expand storage when necessary. However, Nokia 6.1 does not have the option to format the Micro SD card as internal storage.

To summarise: The ability to use an sdcard as internal storage is avaiable with build 00WW_3_206_SP01 However, users have found files put on to the sdcard get corrupted at random 4096-byte boundaries.

Enable developer options by going to "About device", then tap on the build number 7 times. Developer options should now be enabled. Then, in the settings, search for "Force allow apps on external", then you should be able to install apps on your SD card. But you may need to format it as internal storage.

Note: If you format it as internal storage, all data on the SD card will be deleted. If you do this, back up any important data beforehand! Your internal storage will not be affected by this.

I had tried to switch to a feature phone a few years earlier, but that phone was a really dumb Samsung from 2010 or so with no 4G, Wi-Fi or a modern messaging app. That attempt failed, but could things be different with a more modern phone like Nokia 2720 Flip?

While going completely old-school with, for example, Nokia 8800 from 2005 would undoubtedly be uber nerdy and cool, the 2720 Flip is actually a modern device that has some crucial features that older phones lack. Number one is 4G support. With operators around the world shutting down 2G and 3G bands, an old Nokia phone would soon become useless in most countries.

Then there is Google Assistant, which actually works OK for entering text with your voice. The problem is, I switch between four languages in my daily life, and of those, Google Assistant only supports English.

Navigating your contacts is a different story. I have several hundred contacts imported from Google, and it takes the Nokia several seconds to open my contact list. After that, searching for a contact is reasonably fast, which, I hear, is a big improvement compared to the state of things a year or so ago.

KaiOS has a built-in music player that can play tracks from the phone memory or the SD card. It automatically groups the tracks by albums or artists based on the ID3 tags and is generally convenient to use. When using Bluetooth headphones, you can control playback with the headphone buttons. The playback continues when you close the phone, too.

In the end, I opted in for using the wonderful gPodder app on my desktop computer for downloading podcast episodes and syncing them to the phone as regular audio files. I then use the stock music player for listening.

I still have to rely on my iPhone and iPad for some tasks, but those cases are generally few and far between. One notable case is turn-by-turn navigation with Google Maps, Waze or Maps.me, as well as occasional usage of my banking apps. This is when I appreciate the ability to turn on a Wi-Fi hotspot on my Nokia. Most of the time, though, my iPhone is off and sitting in my table drawer.

With its quintessential flip-phone design, the Nokia 2780 Flip is reminiscent of the Nokia 2760 from the late 2000s (which, of course, CNET reviewed in 2008). But it also has newer features like YouTube and Google Maps, which made this challenge feel a bit more feasible for this day and age. It costs $90, has 4G connectivity and runs on major carriers and MVNOs in the US (like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Boost).

In addition to calling, texting, watching YouTube videos and navigating with Google Maps, you can use this phone to surf the web, send emails, take photos and listen to music. There are also several utility features, including but not limited to weather, calendar and notes apps. And it wouldn't be a Nokia phone if it didn't have Snake. There's also a folder with other predownloaded games, like 2048 and Whack-a-Mole.

As I was transferring my contacts and music onto this flip phone, FOMO kicked in. I was scared I would miss something important without my iPhone. But that didn't stop me from moving forward with the challenge anyway. So I put my iPhone in a very hard-to-reach drawer and adopted the Nokia 2780 Flip full-time. And I became a little less nervous once I realized it did a great job of carrying out a phone's most important function -- that is, making calls.

Calling on the Nokia 2780 Flip is intuitive. I could either select a Contact and press the center key to place a call, or just dial a number and press the call or center key. As cool as I think I look with this flip phone up to my ear, I talked on speakerphone most of the time. My friends and family said I sounded clear, but check out the video above to hear for yourself. As for how calls sounded to me on the Nokia 2780 Flip, they came through about as clearly as they normally do on my smartphone. To hang up, I could either hit the end key or very dramatically flip the phone closed, which I saved for special occasions, but do love.

Remember the T9 keyboard? You press the numbers with the letters on the keypad and the phone guesses what word you want. To be honest, I didn't know how to use it because I had a T9 pay-as-you-go phone for about six months in fifth grade, and then an iPhone after that.

But I was familiar with multi-tap texting, where you press the numbers multiple times to write a message letter-by-letter. So I spent my week on the Nokia doing that, which was cumbersome to say the least. As a result, my texts were short and didn't have much personality. My friends told me that whenever my messages were over a line, they were impressed.

It wasn't until shooting B-roll of the Nokia 2780 Flip that my CNET colleague, John Kim, taught me how to properly type on a T9 keypad. T9 definitely allowed me to type more quickly, but it didn't always predict the word I was looking for. And it wasn't as efficient as typing on my iPhone, of course, so I'd still want to keep my texts concise when messaging from the Nokia 2780 Flip.

One unexpected perk of this keyboard is that, because typing is a chore, I found I replied to texts more quickly to get it over with, which is good because normally I'm notoriously slow to return texts. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could send a pretty good selection of emoji, and see the ones sent to me, even if they weren't available on the flip phone.

I really enjoyed testing the camera on this phone. With 5-megapixels, it's quite different from the 48-megapixel camera on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. It's more comparable to an iPhone 4 camera from 2010.

And here is what made me love this camera. I found that with patience and good lighting, I could get some fairly high-quality-looking photos as well. Dare I say these pictures look like they could've been taken on, maybe, an iPhone 11 from 2019?

I even found a solution for low-light settings. The small but mighty palm-sized clip light from Newmowa was perfect to use with the Nokia 2780 Flip. It shone enough light to make photos taken in less-than-ideal lighting conditions look like they, too, were perhaps taken on an iPhone 11. The proof is in the photos below. Just look at the difference between the one taken with the clip light and the others taken with the phone's flash or no additional light at all.

The Nokia 2780 Flip is equipped with Google and a browser app, aptly called Internet. I was curious how much I could really accomplish with the browser on this little flip phone, so I put it to the test. I started by bookmarking my frequently visited sites. Some sites, like Slack, didn't work (apologies to any of my colleagues trying to reach me while I was on-the-go with this flip phone). But Facebook, X, Instagram, Threads and TikTok did. Well, TikTok only kind of works. Videos played, but they were covered by the caption. The cursor moved slowly, and I wasn't able to log in to post any content. So I wasn't doing much scrolling on my favorite site while I was testing this phone.

I could log in and scroll on Instagram (my second-favorite site), but the interface was squished and its cursor was laggy as well. I did manage to post an Instagram story, but the quality wasn't great (photo evidence below) and I didn't feel like using the slow cursor to figure out how to delete it.

There's also a YouTube app, which is less laggy than the internet, but still slow at times. Because the Nokia 2780 Flip's display is so small and gets too dark to see videos at certain angles, I didn't use this app very much.

It's worth noting that there are browser shortcuts that allow you to experiment with, say, zooming in and out to make the interfaces of these sites appear less squished. There's also a "Scroll Mode" that can make browsing on this phone a little faster, but even this mode stalls at times.

To be honest, I was impressed that this flip phone can run these sites at all. But because the interfaces look different and the experience is often slower and more limited in functionality than it is on my smartphone, I didn't love being online on the Nokia 2780 Flip. But that did mean I was on my phone less, which isn't a bad thing.

I appreciate that this phone has Google Maps because I find myself using maps on my smartphone pretty much every day. I do wish Maps on the Nokia 2780 Flip indicated which direction I was facing like my iPhone does so I could immediately tell if I was on the right track. But if you have a better sense of direction than me, this probably won't be an issue for you.

This phone doesn't have turn-by-turn navigation, though. Instead, I had to press the upper-right button to see the next direction. And it doesn't have voice navigation, so I avoided driving anywhere I wasn't familiar with. Not having voice navigation definitely would've been difficult for me long-term because, again, I have a bad sense of direction.

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