You are correct that there are already cheap 2G phones. But now in Nokia's line their cheap phone can do web browsing too. If you don't have a data plan then you simply don't use that feature, but it is not like the phone becomes worthless simply because you haven't had to pay extra for the facility. You are at no disadvantage if you cannot access data on your plan.

These phones also support multiple languages, but nobody complains that this is useless unless the user attends night school to learn all those languages. Nobody complains that this phone (like the previous models that it replaces) have a camera, despite that some people will never use the feature. You are under no obligation to use all the features of the phone. It is not like Nokia are encouraging people to pay extra to get the model of phone that has web browsing; it is just becoming a standard capacity of their entire range now.

The article doesn't need to state this - it just stands to reason! Nokia are not going to sell this in countries where 2G does not exist or is being phased out. As for there being more expensive options available, I don't see what difference that makes. If web browsing is really important to you, and you can afford it, then you probably will want to pay extra for a better screen and faster data. But this phone allows those people who will possibly only use it once in a blue moon; those who want a cheap and small phone that won't break if they drop it.

You are comparing the street price of one product with manufacturer's recommended price of another product. I imagine that the 215 will sell for about 5-10 pounds less than the 220. The Nokia 220 is about a year old, so it is possible that the 215 will replace it. The camera is much better in the 220, but the USB is only version 1.1 in the old phone. Other than that they seem identical, but there may be software differences.

Or plug the phone in to your USB port on the computer and it acts like an external drive - just like you would do if it was a camera or MP3 player. That's the easiest solution.

If you are referring to not being able to browse the Internet using WiFi, then that is not really what this phone is about. Nobody is going to use a device that is so slow and has such a tiny screen for doing lots of web browsing. This is a device for making phone calls, but can do the occasional look up of a website. In fact I would guess that most users of this phone would probably never use the web browsing capability at all.

Why would it be worthless? It would still work as a phone, camera and MP3 player. Obviously, the web browser wouldn't work. If you don't have a data plan you could save money by buying a phone without a web browser at all - except that you really aren't going to find one much cheaper than $29.

Well, yes. This is a phone made for countries that still use 2G. There are still some countries where 2G is the only choice. Just because it is not the choice for your neck-of-the-woods doesn't mean that they should not make the phone.

What? A 0.3 Megapixel, Internet-connected camera? I think not.

These types of phones do not require a data-connected phone plan to work. If you take pictures on the phone, they will save to the micro-SD memory card that you install. Then you simply plug in the micro-USB cable to your computer and copy the picture files (which are saved in JPEG format). There is no cloud involved.

There are a lot of different models of feature phones from Nokia, and not a single one of them works in the way that you suggest. They are designed so that they work in countries that don't have a mobile Internet infrastructure.

If this was all about making money from downloaded apps then they would have included more than 8MB of memory on the thing. These are just basic feature phones that do a few simple things for a cheap price.

There are a lot of people out there who don't want to carry a huge smart phone; they just want something small that can make calls and which doesn't run out of batteries at the end of each day. You tend not to hear about these people, because by definition they are not big on social media.

They aren't "saving up for an Android phone", because you can pick up one of those for just $40 more. They are probably the ones who still buy diaries made from dead trees. It is a niche market that will never go away no matter how cheap smart phone become.

By that rational you could say that it looks like an iPhone, only with a different software load and downscaled specs! Surely for the phone to look like a Kin it has to have at least one feature that is identical to Microsoft's abortion of a phone.

The fact is that this is a slight evolution of a product line that Nokia have had since before they were bought out by Microsoft. It is in no way reminiscent of the Kin. So sure, they could have released a phone based on the old social-media phone, but if you look at every technical spec and user interface then you can see that they clearly didn't.

All you have to do is compare the picture on the article with this Nokia phone from 2007 and you can see that this is just standard Nokia interface and feature spec.

I don't think that it is an error. In fact, it is double the RAM that is in the Nokia 108, which was a particularly disgusting phone that had a very limited support for Bluetooth that only allowed transferring contacts and not connecting audio devices! Surely connecting a headset is what people think of when they talk about having a Bluetooth enabled phone! It implemented just enough to tick a feature box, but not enough to be useful.

The slightly good news is that the 215 at least allows for Bluetooth headsets, although even it misses some (unnamed) features.

In what way does it look like the Kin? It doesn't have the same form factor (QWERTY keyboard vs traditional Nokia-style). It doesn't use the same software user interface. It doesn't have the same features (eg. 8MP camera on the Kin vs 0.3MP on this new phone, 256MB RAM vs 8MB, etc). The Kin used a proprietary browser labelled IEMobile, while this phone uses Opera Mini. The operating system on the Kin was based on Windows CE, while this phone uses Nokia's System 30.

The Kin was marketed specifically as a wanky social-media platform, while this phone is really just a traditional feature phone like Nokia has made for years. It is certainly nothing new, nor does it have anything particularly Microsoft about it as Nokia have made feature phones with web browsers since before smartphones were invented. And it doesn't deserve being splashed on the front page of Slashdot.

You are right. It is against the conventions. But if we have learned anything from the patent system, it's that "cruel and unusual punishment on the Internet" is different enough to be allowed (and quite possibly patentable).

No, that is not the same thing. The original claim was that it was actually getting colder. They justified this by comparing the yearly (and sometimes the average) temperatures to the outlier data point of 1998 (which was not representative of the surrounding years). Sometimes people would try to back up the claim by pointing to journal articles describing how the rate of change had gone down - which is not the same thing!

Once it became apparent that it wasn't actually getting colder, without fanfare they changed it to "the temperature has not risen". Amazingly, they got away with the switch. The deniers often take the slightest mistake from AGW camp (even from decades ago) as some proof that nobody knows what they are talking about. It is a shame that they don't hold themselves accountable to the same criteria.

How can you say this when an entire third of the IPCC report (Working Group II) was dedicated to the "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability" of climate change? They show the positive and negative affects (both direct and indirect).

Here is a quote from the introduction of the Summary for Policymakers:

I would suggest sheer perseverance of publishing the science in the face of such unfounded denialism will eventually do the trick, in the same way that it worked to convince the public of the link between smoking and cancer despite the opposition from vested interests at the time. The attacks on the science and scientists that we see today is very much the same tactic used by the tobacco industry and conservative organisations against doctors who claimed that smoking was dangerous.

In the end, science will win over politics (just like it did with tobacco, asbestos, etc). Those "significant number of the public and in politics" who claim to know better than all the climate scientists of the world will look more and more out of touch with reality as the temperature records keep getting broken.

In fact, the deniers have put a lot of stock in the current slow-down of temperature increase, and once it starts accelerating again (as it has done numerous times when there have been similar slow-downs over the last century) then it will cause great damage to their public support. If you remember back 5 years or so years ago, many deniers were claiming that it was actually getting cooler in comparison to the El Nino year of 1998. Once the record temperatures started happening again they silently dropped that claim, although it still hasn't stopped a lot of people from still bringing up how some people considered global cooling to be a possibility back in the 1970s. How convenient that they forget their own side's similar mistakes.

That is also true about the US too, and their adamant allegations about another country have always turned out to be true...

There is no evidence to suggest any of these at all. PCs were very customisable, so OEMs and users alike could spec systems the way they wanted. If they didn't want floppies, or wanted to add built-in WiFi then it was all possible (although on-board implementations of WiFi often still look to the system like PCI cards). The first version of 64-bit Windows was released two years before Apple started to add support to OS X.

I remember having USB connectors on my motherboard long before we had anything to plug into them (devices to plug in didn't appear on the market until they came out with version 1.1 of the standard that fixed a bunch of problems) and before Apple started using the connectors. It is hardly surprising that the connectors would appear on the PC first considering that the standard was developed by "Compaq, Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, and Nortel" (according to Wikipedia). The difference was that they didn't throw out the old connectors (and so gradually moved to the new standard) rather than Apple's approach.

The thing about the "Apple model" is that there is less flexibility in the hardware. With PCs (and other systems) you could make the computers as you wanted them to be by using industry-standard components. Yes, Apple started using those components, but would they have ever done that without the PC to spur them on? Would they have ever had real multitasking without Unix and Windows shaming them into doing it?

Probably. Who knows? It really doesn't matter, since we can't change history to find out the answer.