HMD’s new Nokia phone has a hidden charger for included earbuds

HMD has announced a trio of new Nokia feature phones including the Nokia 5710 XpressAudio, which has a built-in charging case for an included pair of true wireless earbuds. The company is far from the first to have had this idea (check out 2019’s Servo R25 as one recent example), but it’s notable to see the form factor attempted by a more established company with global reach.

The Nokia 5710 XpressAudio looks like a regular candy bar-style feature phone from the front, with a 2.4-inch display and classic T9 keypad. But around back, there’s a charging compartment, revealed with the slide of a plastic cover. The device will retail for £74.99 (€69) and will be available in the UK in late July, though there’s no word on a US release.

The true wireless earbuds offer up to four hours of music playback per charge, or 2.4 hours of talk time, and the phone itself has a long enough battery life that it doesn’t sound like keeping the accessories charged will be much of a problem. HMD says the Nokia 5710 XpressAudio’s removable 1,450mAh battery offers up to six hours of talk time over 4G and up to 20 days of standby with two 4G SIM cards inserted.

Since the Nokia 5710 XpressAudio is a feature phone, there’s no mention of support for modern music streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music. (It runs on the stripped-back Series 30 Plus operating system used in Nokia-branded phones for almost a decade.) HMD is rightly not resurrecting the Nokia music services of old (they were bad). Instead, the device’s playback options are a bit more old-fashioned and include the ability to play MP3s or listen to a built-in FM radio.

Image: HMD

Alongside the Nokia 5710 XpressAudio, HMD has also announced the Nokia 8210 4G feature phone (based on the classic Nokia 8210 released in 1999) and a flip phone called the Nokia 2660 Flip. The 8210 4G will retail for £64.99 (€59), while the Nokia 2660 Flip will cost £64.99 (€69) and has an optional charging cradle that costs an extra £20 (€20). Both are available in late July.

Finally, there’s the Nokia T10, a smaller eight-inch Android tablet compared to the 10-inch T20 released last year. Prices start at £129 (€159) for a Wi-Fi-only model with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage that will be available in August.