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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