Nokia 3210 4G
The classic I grew up with, back as a budget first phone. It calls, texts and plays Snake, and that's about it.
- No app store, which means no social media: no Snapchat, no WhatsApp, no feed. Calling and texting is the entire job description.
- It calls over 4G (VoLTE), and that's the single most important line here. Norway's 2G network is being switched off, by Telia through 2025 and by Telenor by the end of 2027, and when it goes, plenty of cheap older feature phones will no longer be able to make a call. This one will.
- The battery runs for days, and when it eventually fades you just swap in a new one. A replaceable battery has become a rarity.
- From about €70, it's cheap enough that a lost or broken phone is a nuisance, not a crisis.
- Little touches that are easy to love: a 3.5 mm headphone jack, FM radio, a memory card slot, room for two SIM cards and Snake. It charges over USB-C like everything else in the house.
- Lyd & Bilde recommends this phone and gave it 4 out of 6, but the review calls the call audio “tinny”, the menus fiddly, and the 2-megapixel camera is mostly there for fun.
- Texting means T9 on the number keys, and after years of touchscreens that takes concentration. Expect short messages and a bit of sighing early on.
- No app store also means no BankID and no Vipps, and there's no QR scanner, so login and payment codes can't be scanned. A teenager who depends on those will need something else.
- No location sharing. You can't see where your child is, the way you can with an Xplora watch. Whether that's a drawback or a feature depends on how you look at it.
- It isn't completely sealed: there's a basic browser and a handful of “cloud apps”, one of them for Facebook. In practice the 2.4-inch screen is too small for any of it to tempt anyone, but you should know the door exists.
The cheapest sensible way I know of to give a child a phone that's just a phone. Most of what the review docked points for barely matters in this role, and some of it is the point. No apps to vanish into. A keypad that keeps messages short. A screen nobody gets stuck staring at. Lyd & Bilde itself singles out a child's first phone as the job it fits. And because it calls over 4G, it keeps working after the 2G network goes dark, unlike many of the older feature phones tempting you with even lower prices.
It's the wrong phone for a teenager who needs BankID and Vipps day to day. And if you want to see where your child is, that's an Xplora watch's job, not this one's. But when it's time for a first phone, this is a very decent place to start. If the budget stretches, the Mudita Kompakt is the upgrade.
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