I’m a little bit in love with the Nokia 6300 4G ($69.99), a KaiOS quasi-smartphone that’s an ideal traveling companion. The 6300 looks like a candy-bar voice phone, and its form factor alone will keep you from getting sucked into the internet. But it has just enough smarts to help you navigate, play some music, and keep you connected around the globe. If you want to stay reachable while you keep your eyes on the sights around you, it’s a perfect choice. That makes it our Editors’ Choice for simple voice phones on T-Mobile’s network.
A 21st-Century Voice Phone
Big smartphone slabs rule America, but there’s still room in many hearts for voice-focused phones with traditional keypads. Many voice phone users will have to upgrade their devices soon because the carriers are turning off the 3G and 2G networks that older voice phones rely on. Fortunately, a new generation of 4G LTE voice phones has sprung up, some sold by carriers and some, like the 6300, unlocked.
Buying unlocked means you can take advantage of super-cheap phone plans from virtual operators such as US Mobile, which has an unlimited talk and text plan for $10 or a plan with 1GB data for $15. If you’re used to a smartphone, you’ll be amazed by how far 1GB stretches on a voice phone like the 6300, even when you’re streaming music or checking social media
This smooth, matte plastic slab is available in gray, green, or white. It measures 5.17 by 2.09 by 0.54 inches (HWD) and weighs only 3.5 ounces; it’s a little taller than the less expensive Nokia 225, but still easy to slip into a pocket. There’s a basic 2.4-inch, 320-by-240-pixel LCD under an easily scratched, but not easily cracked, plastic panel.
The number pad is flat and close-set. It looks elegant, but if you have motor challenges, you’ll prefer a phone with a more separated keypad, such as the Sunbeam F1.
There’s a typical and divisive Nokia quirk here: no hardware volume rocker. Some people like that. I’m not a fan. You use the cursor pad to change the volume in a call; otherwise, from the home screen, you press up and then use an onscreen setting slider to change the volume.
A Master of Connection
The 6300 is a very rare dual-SIM phone that’s been approved for VOLTE and Wi-Fi calling use by all three US carriers. You can use one SIM, a US and a foreign SIM, or two US SIMs. Call quality is spot on, and the 6300 is one of the loudest voice phones we’ve encountered: In our testing, the earpiece went up to 93.9dB, and the speaker went to 93.2dB at six inches—more than 4dB louder than the Nokia 225.
According to Nokia’s spec sheet, this phone is designed very well for T-Mobile’s network and it will do well on AT&T’s, but it will struggle with coverage on Verizon’s. It has LTE bands 2/4/5/12/66/71 in the US. That will give it extended range on T-Mobile’s band 71, unlike the Nokia 225 and the Sunbeam F1. But the spec sheet is missing band 13, which is critical for long-range Verizon coverage. That band is available on the Kyocera DuraXV Extreme, the Nuu F4L, and the Sunbeam F1.
The spec sheet doesn’t list any international LTE bands for the US model, so you’re likely to get 3G coverage abroad. That said, foreign carriers are much less aggressive than US ones are when it comes to turning off 3G.
There are 26 included ringtones, and you can also use your own MP3s.
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Wi-Fi is restricted to the 2.4GHz band. There’s a tethering option, so I was able to check LTE speeds. With a category 4 LTE modem, the 6300 only runs at a fraction of the speed available to top smartphones. Where a Galaxy S21 Ultra showed 172Mbps down and 49.1Mbps up, the 6300 managed 19.5Mbps down and 24.8Mbps up. That said, the 6300’s speed is similar to what we’ve seen on other low-cost voice phones with tethering modes.
KaiOS, Not Chaos
The 6300 uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 chipset. It has 512MB of RAM and 4GB of storage; there’s a microSD card slot under the battery that had no problem with my 256GB card.
KaiOS, a descendant of Firefox OS, is designed to run on low-power devices like this one. It has an app store. It’s very popular in Africa and India. Here in the US, it has appeared on Alcatel flip phones, but it doesn’t have the market share to attract many developers. If you’re used to Android or iOS, it’ll take you a little while to adjust.
The phone comes preloaded with (deletable) Facebook and YouTube apps. A Flip TV app streams news channels such as ABC News and Cheddar, and a Kinet TV app streams cable entertainment channels such as A&E. But there’s no Amazon Prime, Hulu, or Netflix.
Mainstream streaming music apps are also missing. But I found some joy in a World Radio app that let me stream some Listen.FM 80s stations over Bluetooth to my stereo OnePlus Buds. It skipped occasionally but was generally reliable. Due to the limits of KaiOS, streaming music won’t run in the background while you do something else on the phone; you’ll have to let go of that multitasking urge.
The killer app is Google Maps, which comes preloaded and provides transit, walking, and driving directions. Maps is the app I miss when I’m out with a basic phone and I need to find a bookstore, a park, or a Chipotle. More than any other feature, its inclusion makes the 6300 a satisfying smartphone replacement.
The OS is definitely less responsive than on even more basic phones, though it’s considerably better than some Android-based feature phones such as the Nuu F4L. For what it’s worth, it feels a little faster than the Alcatel Go Flip 3, which has a similar processor and OS. Some user reviews say the 6300 really slows down after a while. I didn’t see that, but I only tested it for about a week.
Text input defaults to triple-tap; there’s also a predictive text mode, but you can’t set it as the default. Fortunately, as long as you have 4G or Wi-Fi, you can hold down the cursor pad in any text field to use Google text-to-speech. This truly transforms the experience of texting, WhatsApp, entering addresses in Maps, and other text entry.
As with the Nokia 225, the 6300’s SMS app handles individual text and picture messages perfectly well, threading them by recipient. Group texts are an absolute mess, arriving in various different threads and sometimes out of order. But the 6300 has a solution: WhatsApp. The native WhatsApp client on the phone handles groups and threads much better. The 6300 also has emoji support.
Battery life is a strength here. In testing, the 6300 eked out 7 hours, 37 minutes of talk time, compared with 6 hours, 21 minutes on the smaller Nokia 225. But since this is a quasi-smartphone that’s downloading and processing data, standby time will be shorter than on an even simpler device: a few days, not several. Uninstalling apps helps, of course.
Both Facebook and Twitter clients are available. Once I set up Facebook, it started pushing me a ton of notifications and eating up massive amounts of battery, so I uninstalled it. But the option is there if Twitter DMs or Facebook Messenger are your primary means of texting; you’ll just have to charge the phone daily.
Both the 225 and the 6300 have a single VGA camera. Different camera software means different results, though. There’s a variable selfie timer on the 6300 but no Night mode. Images look slightly better than the 225’s, with more realistic colors in outdoor shots and a little more sharpness in my indoor shot—but it’s still VGA. You can transfer photos onto a microSD card, or transmit them over Bluetooth or with a messaging app.
Neither Fish Nor Fowl, But Fabulous
The Nokia 6300 isn’t really a smartphone or a voice phone. It sits in a very useful place between the two. Out and about with the 6300 for a day, I often used the streaming radio and directions, and I really preferred dictating over dealing with triple-tap. I couldn’t do any of that with a more basic phone. But the tiny screen and slow OS never tempted me into hours of staring at videos or social media.
If you’re looking for a purer stripped-down experience, consider “digital disconnector” phones such as the Sunbeam F1 ($195) and Punkt MP02 ($349). If your budget is tight, try the Nokia 225 ($49.99). But if you want the most necessary smartphone features on a phone that still helps you break your doomscrolling habit, the 6300 hits the sweet spot. If you’re on T-Mobile, the Nokia 6300 is the best inexpensive, simple phone you’ll find.
