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The newest Nokia phone is a sequel to one that came out in 2007, addressing the same need for music on the go.
David Lumb is a mobile reporter covering phones, tablets, smartwatches, and how they're changing our lives. He spent the last decade reviewing phones for TechRadar as well as covering tech, gaming, and culture for Engadget, Popular Mechanics, NBC Asian America, Increment, Fast Company, and others. He has other loves than phones, of course -- namely coffee, beaches, and burritos.
Earlier this week, Nokia launched a new feature phone, with numbered buttons and a novel feature: slots on the back cover for charging a pair of true wireless earbuds, which come with the handset. It shouldn't be a surprise that the phone is focused on audio, because it's a sequel to a music-focused Nokia phone that came out 15 years ago.
Wireless earbud slots aside, the new Nokia 5710 XpressAudio looks a lot like the Nokia 5700 XpressMusic, a phone that launched in 2007. CNET called it a "decent enough music phone" but found that it didn't quite measure up to the Sony Ericsson Walkmans, which were the dominant music-centric phones of the day. The Nokia 5700 had its own gimmick: The lower half rotated 180 degrees to let users switch between the T9 keypad and a face full of audio control buttons.
The new Nokia 5710 doesn't rotate, but it does have media-controlling buttons on the top right side and oversize volume buttons on the top left side. Though its specs don't match up to modern phones -- it has a 2.4-inch Quad VGA display, 128MB of internal storage expandable to 32GB via MicroSD, and 48MB of RAM -- it does have an internal FM tuner and MP3 player. Someone hunting for basic phone functionality could find the music-oriented Nokia 5710 to be the perfect device they weren't expecting to find in the year 2022.
Nokia didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on price or availability.
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