Nokia 125. A review.

On December 24, I went to celebrate Christmas in Tartu.

On the very hurried way to the train, I dropped my regular dual-SIM Nokia 130 button phone into a puddle, and I think its microphone broke, but I hadn't discovered this until the second day of my stay in Tartu, when I finally needed to make a phone call.

It was holiday time, and all the mobile phone shops in Tartu were closed.

I met a friend in the city, who took me to Prisma, which is the local Finnish big-box store — the only one consistently open through holidays — and bought a Nokia 125 (dual-SIM, mini-SIM) for €25.

There were better Nokia models available, including even Nokia 130 (ariund €69, IIRC), but those units were more expensive, locked behind a counter, and I didn't bother calling a store employee to unlock it.

(The other reason was, that it was the end of a month, and I'd already splurged on gifts, so I didn't yet feel ready to spend extra for a brand-new phone.)

I specifically also wanted a dual-SIM phone that would accept mini-SIM cards

HMD's phone packaging is unambiguous as to whether a phone is dual-DIM or not — dual-SIM devices have two bar codes and two sets of unlock codes.

Whether an HMD-made phone supports mini-SIM, micro-SIM, or nano-SIM cards, is ambiguous, and my friend and I had to check the GSM Arena website about each prospective model for verification.

(Because some of the models were locked behind a counter, we didn't have access to the side of each different Nokia/HMD box with that information.)

Compared to the small and compact Nokia 130, Nokia 125 is big and has big buttons — a senior's phone.

Compared to Nokia 130, Nokia 125 also doesn't have Bluetooth, no microSD card reader, and no MP3 player.

The better features in Nokia 125 are headset-independent FM radio, which might explain the size, and a more powerful torchlight.

Nokia 125 (and 130) both support USB charging using the micro-USB (micro-B) connector. This comes handy when charging on the move with a dedicated USB cable in public transport.

The box for Nokia 125 contains only the phone and the charger with an inseparable cable. No headset was included.

Otherwise, the phone is really basic — it only has English and Nordic languages for the user interface, only one background image, only two ringtones (no way to add more), and not the most responsive user interface.

Unlike Nokia 130, Nokia 125 also doesn't support the Cyrillic alphabet. Considering the languages involved for the UI, the model was probably meant for people in the Nordic/Western regions who only interact via SMS with people using the Latin alphabet.

But Estonia has a large Russian-speaking population (ca 25%), and I sometimes use my featurephones for work, too, occasionally interacting with Russian-speaking coworkers.

Receiving SMSes as blank squares is not a good thing, if I must forward that SMS to my smartphone just to read its contents.

Considering the paucity of ringtones, background images, and user interface languages — not even Estonian was included, in Estonia (!) — then it seems, that HMD, the maker of Nokia 125, was probably in a hurry to release the model. But this is only speculation.

Hopefully, HMD will update its packaging, so that some of the important phone features — single/dual-SIM, type of SIM card, microSD card support, presence of Bluetooth (if any), 2G/3G/4G network support — would be visible on all sides of the box, to better inform customers.