BARCELONA—I think I found the future of flip phones at Mobile World Congress. Doro's 7050, coming to Consumer Cellular in May, is a well-designed traditional flip phone running a full version of KaiOS with the potential to download Google apps. For the 15 percent or so of Americans who still want a flip, it has real potential.
Doro is a Swedish phone maker that specializes in phones for seniors. I hate tarring a generation with an incapacity brush, so I like to call them simple phones: they tend to have clear operating systems and simplified interfaces. Their phones are sold in the US by Consumer Cellular, which runs on AT&T's network.
The 7050 (which will be called the 7060 in Europe) is a plastic flip phone with a black outside face and a white body inside. The keys are well separated and very high contrast—not at all like the cramped keypad on Nokia's new 8110 Reloaded, the other high-profile KaiOS flips at this show. There's an external LCD to show the time and caller ID information. The phone has a 3MP camera on the outside of the flip, and the phone has an SOS button on the side, which can call three emergency contacts.
Flip it open, and the 2.8-inch display inside isn't bright, but it does the job. It runs a 1.3GHz quad-core Mediatek chipset, but the OS is the real star here, and it's why I'm so excited. KaiOS, which is a relative of Firefox OS, gives you a traditional feature phone menu, but also offers downloadable HTML5 apps. The Alcatel Go Flip, currently sold in the US, is sluggish and crippled, and doesn't have its app store. But on the Doro 7050, the OS is much more responsive; I downloaded and played a few games easily.
Because it's a 3G/4G phone on the AT&T network, it's likely to have even better coverage than existing 3G flip phones do. AT&T has been using an increasing amount of low-band 700MHz and 850MHz spectrum for 4G LTE, and the lower the bandwidth, the farther range you typically get from a cell tower. The phone will also be more future-proof than existing 3G phones, as all the growth in AT&T's network from here on out is going to be on 4G.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make calls on the 7050. I know, call quality is everything on a phone like this, but that's why we have to wait for the review.
The 7050 has the basic features you expect from flip phones: there's a music player, calendar, contact book, camera, and video player. But that KaiOS store lets it become more powerful if the user feels up to it.
Also today at MWC, Kai announced that Facebook and Google apps are coming to the KaiOS store. That's a great step forward for these kinds of feature/simple/senior phones. The idea is to give folks who don't want a smartphone some way to access the social networks where relatives are posting all the baby pictures. Those apps will be available on the 7050, a Doro rep confirmed at the show.
Doro didn't have a full spec sheet for the 7050, and didn't give a price. But it will probably be quite affordable when it hits Consumer Cellular.