Nokia 800 Tough review: Features | Pricing | Specs

Where to buy

Plenty of people break smartphones and even feature phones for that matter. As a species, we're remarkably clumsy creatures, and any device that lives with us day in and day out is bound to cop a little accidental abuse.

Enter the Nokia 800 Tough. Now, you can't give a phone a suffix like that without being tough, but all too often phones that are particularly hardened are also rather hard to live with. The Nokia 800 Tough isn't a phone for everyone, but anyone considering a feature phone purchase in 2019 should absolutely put it at the top of their list.

Design

• 2.4-inch QVGA display is blocky
• Small keys
• Easy to open up or seal when needed

• Read our full review of the Nokia 800 Tough's design

  The Nokia 800 Tough largely has the look of a candy bar style feature phone, albeit with the typical slightly blockier build that you'd expect out of a ruggedised handset.

  The Nokia 800 Tough features a 2.4-inch display, which is pretty small by 2019 standards, but not entirely out of the ordinary in the feature-phone world. It's running with just a QVGA (320x240) resolution, so anything you're going to do with the Nokia 800 Tough is going to be blocky by definition.

  HMD Global, the folks with the licence to produce Nokia-branded phones, sells the Nokia 800 Tough in two colour variants, with a choice of either "Black Steel" or "Desert Sand" finishes. My review model was the Black Steel variant, but either way, these are phones with a deliberately sombre look.

  There's a carabiner loop at the base so you could hook it securely depending on your needs, but there's otherwise no external facing parts or ports. They're securely locked down behind rubber or plastic flaps.

  On the left side, you'll find the SIM card and microSD card slot. It's not a dual SIM phone, so there's no question of choosing between storage expansion and a second SIM, however.

  At the top, rubber flaps protect the 3.5mm headphone jack and microUSB charging slot, sitting just next to a bulb that's specifically there to be a flashlight.

  Around the back, there's a single-lens camera with no camera bump to speak of, as well as exposed screws that really drive home the whole "this phone is quite sturdy" message, just in case you hadn't sussed that by now.

  One note of caution here is that the Nokia 800 Tough features somewhat small rectangular buttons. They're certainly tough – more on that later – but if you prefer a feature phone with big friendly buttons, you might find the Nokia 800 Tough a little tricky to handle.

Camera

• Rear 2MP camera... exists

• See sample photos and read our full review of the Nokia 800 Tough's camera

  HMD Global can certainly pack an interesting camera into a Nokia-branded phone. Just look at the Nokia 9 Pureview, for example. However, in the feature-phone world, it's delivered disappointing camera after disappointing camera, and the Nokia 800 Tough is no exception.

  I totally get that HMD Global is keeping costs down by not putting cutting-edge cameras into its feature phones, but the 2MP sensor on the Nokia 800 Tough is just plain painful to use. Expect lots of blur, washed-out colours and woeful light pick-up if it's the only camera you have on you.

  It does feel like a missed opportunity to deliver a "tradie" suitable phone that could also be used for, say, site inspections where having decent photos is a definite plus. The Nokia 800 Tough has a camera, but it's not one you're ever going to go anywhere near out of preference.

  Nokia 800 Tough sample photos

  

  

  

Performance

• KaiOS provides essential functions
• Yes, it plays Snake
• Google Assistant gets past the T9 text trap nicely
• It's tougher than anything you're likely to throw at it accidentally

• Read our full review of the Nokia 800 Tough's performance

  Buy just about any HMD Global Android phone, and you're getting Android One, with guaranteed updates and a clean, simple interface.

  Buy any HMD Global feature phone, and that's not what you get. The Nokia 800 Tough runs on the KaiOS feature-phone platform, albeit with a few HMD Global tweaks. For the most part, you're signing up to a classic T9 text and navigation button interface, with no touchscreen capability at all.

  The basics of messaging and calls are covered, and for many feature-phone users, that's all you might want. Nokia stalwart Snake is included, but it's once again that weird Gameloft conversion with colour and diagonal movement rather than the classic 90-degree turns model.

  HMD Global does mix it up beyond Snake with pre-installed features more fitting of a smartphone, although the degree to which you'll really use them is debatable. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Google Maps and YouTube are all pre-installed, and the KaiOS app store offers a variety of other apps to add to the Nokia 800 Tough. You're not getting the full smartphone experience here, and there is one obvious catch with going full into, say, your social media world with this phone.

  With no touchscreen or onscreen keyboard, you're limited to T9 text entry, which is insanely slow and cumbersome by 2019 standards. The saving grace here of a sort is that Google Assistant is supported, so a long press on the selection key will allow you to speak commands and enter search queries for selected apps. I'd only use the Nokia 800 Tough as a web-browsing machine in an emergency, but I'd certainly use spoken commands rather than typing if I had to.

  All of this is quite standard for Nokia phones, and if that's all you want, save a few bucks and buy the Nokia 2720 Flip, Nokia 8110 or Nokia 3310 instead.

  

  The reason you'd buy the Nokia 800 Tough is implicit in that suffix. HMD Global states that it's IP68 rated for water and dust ingress and capable of surviving drops of up to 1.8 metres. It's MIL-STD-810G rated and HMD Global says that it's capable of operating in temperatures as low as -20 Celsius and up to 55 Celsius. Sydney's recent temperatures haven't quite peaked that high, although we're still early in the hotter season.

  It's a tough phone in specification terms, and we don't see those all too often, so I had to work out how to test that endurance in a sensible way. Sure, I could run over the Nokia 800 Tough with a steamroller, but it turned out that there wasn't any money in the budget to hire one, and it's not exactly the point. Push the Nokia 800 Tough hard enough and I'm sure it would die eventually, but what it's built for is surviving accidental incidents.

  Which isn't to say that I didn't have a certain quantity of malicious fun putting the Nokia 800 Tough through its paces. It survived numerous drops onto concrete tiles with only a small scuff on the side and any number of drops onto the ground. It even survived being pitched off my carport roof, and it was only as it was heading downwards with the force of gravity that I realised I was dropping it from way more than the 1.8m stated drop-survival distance. It survived anyway, but don't try that at home, folks.

  The Nokia 800 Tough also survived any number of not-quite-accidental drops to the floor to the ground and even a couple of games of skim-the-Nokia-800-Tough-down-the-stairs.

  That's a game you're not likely to deliberately play all that often, but aside from picking up some dirt when I pegged it deliberately into my front garden, there really wasn't too much to get concerned with.

  Well, except that I had a dirty phone, but a quick splash with some water saw that off without doing the Nokia 800 Tough any harm at all.

  I'm a little surprised that YouTube isn't full of videos of folks testing the Nokia 800 Tough to the destruction point because that feels like viral gold, but the point here really is that for just about any accidental scenario you can think of, the Nokia 800 Tough is quite likely to come through it without issue.

  Excluding those of you that drive steamrollers for a living, that is.

Battery life

• Easy week or more of battery life
• Sealed battery unlike other Nokia feature phones

• Read our full review of the Nokia 800 Tough's battery life

  The Nokia 800 Tough features a 2100mAh battery, which is on the larger side for feature phones, but a touch mediocre for smartphones. Unlike its Nokia feature phone siblings, it's a sealed battery rather than a replaceable unit, but that makes sense within its durability constraints.

  Feature phones typically have exceptional battery life, if only because they really don't do that much compared to a modern smartphone. The Nokia 800 Tough is no exception. HMD Global rates the Nokia 800 Tough as capable of up to 34 days of 4G battery life.

  It's a claim that stacks up anecdotally, too. The Nokia 800 Tough has YouTube, so I can run our standard one-hour video test on it, although at QVGA resolution, it's not quite a like-for-like test with other smartphones. After an hour's play at moderate volume, the Nokia 800 Tough still had 91% battery left over. Its conception of "full screen" video is obviously well below any real smartphone, but that was a surprisingly good figure for it to manage.

  Most folks aren't going to use the Nokia 800 Tough for their YouTube binges all that much, but in day-to-day usage, I'd happily say that it's an easy 4- to 7-day phone, depending on just how many calls you make or how much Snake you play, and obviously a whole lot more if it's just there for folks to contact you on.

Verdict

• Solid and dependable
• The best feature phone of 2019

The market for feature phones isn't immense, and as a result, the competition isn't particularly fierce. Most manufacturers who still offer feature phones provide simple but essentially compromised devices.

The Nokia 800 Tough isn't a complex device, and it's certainly not a smartphone, but I wouldn't call it compromised. While the core appeal is likely to be among tradies or other folks who work in environments that would kill regular smartphones or require heavy cases to protect them, it's also an excellent choice if you want a long-term durable feature phone.

The competition might not be fierce, but the Nokia 800 Tough is easily the best feature phone I've tested this year.

Pricing and availability

Price

RRP $199

Where to buy

Amazon

eBay

Kogan

Alternatives

If you want a rugged feature phone in 2019, you're essentially out of luck. Buy the Nokia 800 Tough.

If you just want a feature phone and can't meet the Nokia 800 Tough's asking price, you could opt for the Nokia 2720 Flip; at least there, the flip screen provides a level of protection against simple drops, albeit nothing like the Nokia 800 Tough.

If you can find them at retail, there are also the Nokia 8110 4G and the Nokia 3310 3G handsets, both of which run on the same KaiOS platform as the Nokia 800 tough.

Specifications