Nokia 2660 Flip Review: The Simpler Phone Life

The Nokia 2660 Flip is an unashamedly simple feature phone, for better and worse – depending on your perspective.

Pros	Cons
Big friendly buttons	No Wi-Fi is an interesting choice
Removable battery	Included camera is so bad, it’s criminal
Great battery life	Anything but calling or texting is very slow

Score: 4/5

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I’ve been a tech journalist long enough to have seen the mobile market change a lot. Back when I started, feature phones were the only mobile phones. The most desired feature in a mobile phone at that time? That it could play “Snake” while you were waiting for a bus.

Then came the smartphone, wiping out the feature phone market… almost entirely.

There’s still people out there who just want that simpler phone experience, and that’s the market that the Nokia 2660 Flip should fit rather nicely. It brings with it the familiarity of the Nokia brand – though, as with all Nokias of late it’s actually via HMD Global, the company that has the licensing rights to the name – a simple flip form factor and, yes, it can play Snake.

It’s also pitched – as HMD Global’s done with many of its throwback Nokias – as a kind of digital detox phone, because its feature set is quite limited, so you’re not going to be so horribly addicted to your smartphone.

I can see where that works, and within this much smaller market of available handsets, the Nokia 2660 Flip is one of the good ones. That doesn’t mean it’s always super satisfying to use, and to be clear I’m jumping straight back to a smartphone the moment this review’s written.

Still, if you do want that simpler phone life, it should meet your needs – mostly.

Design

The Nokia 2660 Flip is, as the name suggests a flip phone, but this is no Motorola Razr 40 Ultra. For a start, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper, and the folding mechanism on the 2660 Flip is an actual hinge with the primary 2.8 inch screen at the top. Amusingly, HMD Global calls this a “big” screen, although back in the day I guess that would have been true.

Everything about the Nokia 2660 Flip’s design is simple, and that’s both good and bad. On the plus side, if you’re a phone user who can’t get on with touch screens and needs physical buttons, the number pad works quite well. Opening and closing the Nokia 2660 Flip has a kind of pleasing “thump” to it, great for when you’re finishing up a call.

When closed, all you get is a simple 1.77 inch display for time and notification display, plus volume controls and a power button that does double duty when the phone is open. A long press on the power button when the Nokia 2660 Flip is open will activate its emergency calling mode instead. I haven’t had any emergencies while testing the Nokia 2660 Flip, but I can appreciate the utility of having a quick emergency calling button for – for example – older users who might live alone and need such a feature.

The Nokia 2660 Flip also sells a wide array of colour choices. The model HMD Global loaned me was in Lush Green, but there’s also Pop Pink, Red, Blue or Black models to pick from.

You also get the throwback feature of having a fully removable battery, accessed from the rear. That’s also where you load in your nano SIM card, or even two of them thanks to the dual SIM card slots. However it’s also where you’ll start to get an appreciation of where the Nokia 2660 Flip’s simpler design is a bit of a downside.

At $129 outright the Nokia 2660 Flip is relatively inexpensive, and one of the key ways HMD Global has managed that is by building it out of quite cheap plastic.

It doesn’t feel robust in the way that classic Nokias did, and if you were around then you know what I mean. So many of them felt like they could take a drop down some concrete stairs and keep on ticking.

Out of respect for the review unit I haven’t tested that on the Nokia 2660 Flip – that sound you hear is Nokia’s PR recovering from their near heart attacks – but I’m pretty sure if I did, it would shatter into bits.

Camera

The Nokia 2660 Flip has a single rear facing 0.3MP camera. No, that’s not a typo, or a misplaced digit. It’s almost a typo to say that the Nokia 2660 Flip has a camera, to be frank.

Look, I get that classic old school phones had very rudimentary cameras on them, and again it’s absolutely in service to the lower asking price of the Nokia 2660 Flip, but there’s no amount of dressing up the camera’s appeal as “retro” that will get past the fact that this phone takes bad photos nearly all of the time.

It’s slow, it’s terrible in anything but the best light, and even then you’re likely to end up with horribly washed out shots.

I genuinely feel like it’s a mistake just having the camera here, because nobody’s going to take decent shots with it, and it might have been even cheaper without it.

Check out the photo gallery below, but bear in mind that these are the best photos I could take from it, often after several attempts at each shot. You really don’t want to see the worse ones.

Nokia 2660 Flip Sample Photos

Performance

The Nokia 2660 Flip runs on a Unisoc T107 Processor, although again “runs’ isn’t the right word here. Like many other feature phones, you’re not talking about a full array of exciting functions and new apps to install; most users are going to be primarily drawn to the Nokia 2660 Flip as a calling and texting machine only. For those functions it’s fine and works exactly as you might remember classic feature phones working 20 years or more ago.

One fun aside realisation is that the T107 is a 1GHz chip. At the time Nokia was making its classic flip phones, that would have been the speed of choice for quite a high-end PC running Windows… but that’s not the story here, because the T107 is a simple, inexpensive cheap part by 2023 standards.

But it is 2023, so there has to be more than just calls and texts, right? There is… with a lot of compromise. Yes, it runs Snake, and that’s fine. There’s also a small array of other games to play such as Tetris and an appallingly bad racing game called Racing Attack. Again, sure, maybe that’s retro and with my retro gaming hat on I should acknowledge that mobile phone games started very simple. At the same time, they’re the one category of late 90s-early 2000s gaming that has aged appallingly badly.

You can also surf the web on the Nokia 2660 Flip, or at least try to paddle through it. There’s two challenges here. Firstly, to keep battery consumption minimal, the Nokia 2660 Flip does not support Wi-Fi at all in any way.

So if you want to or need to go online for any function, it’s going to have to be with your SIM’s mobile data. I could see some simpler phone afficionados, especially those on PAYG style pricey-data plans not being fans of that, but it’s the choice that HMD Global has made.

Then there’s the issue of actually entering URLs. The Nokia 2660 Flip tries to be helpful with autocomplete from the T9 texting pad, but it all too often jumps ahead, making entering longer URLs an absolute chore.

Yes, I did load AlexReviewsTech on it, just to see what would happen. It loaded some of the page, but not all, did super weird things with some of the text fonting and was generally not great.

That’s maybe the point of this phone though, because if you were viewing it as a digital detox, you’d only use it for online functions if you were truly desperate.

Battery

Classic feature phones had battery life that was pitched as lasting days… and those were the days when you could take a vendor’s claims of battery endurance at face value.

Most of us only charged phones on a weekly basis, whereas the vast majority of smartphones require a daily trip to the power point for some electrons.

So where does the Nokia 2660 Flip sit in this equation? Quite well for the most part. I can’t actually run my standard YouTube battery tests on the Nokia 2660 Flip for obvious reasons, but as a standalone phone it’s easily capable of at least 3-4 days of semi-regular usage, and considerably longer on standby.

For its intended audience of people who just want phone devices or digital detox gadgets, that’s more than enough.

One feature I do wish HMD Global had updated on the Nokia 2660 Flip was the charger. It’s in the box, which is great, but it’s also microUSB, which fewer and fewer gadgets use as time goes by. Would it hurt you to make it USB-C, HMD Global?

Nokia 2660 Flip: Alex’s Verdict

The Nokia 2660 Flip isn’t for me, for sure, but I can see the appeal.

The Nokia brand still has a certain cachet, and while it’s built from simple plastic, the design is right and the colour choices are appealing.

For basic phone and texting use it’s a great little phone with excellent battery life. For any kind of extended use beyond that, however, the cracks quickly show, whether it’s the lack of Wi-Fi, the clunky way it handles Internet access or the terrible, terrible camera.

However, you’re also not awash with a lot of feature phone choices, and much of that is par for the course with this kind of phone. The comparison with a budget smartphone isn’t quite a one-to-one affair, and if you genuinely don’t want a smartphone, then the Nokia 2660 Flip is, indeed, a smart choice.