Recently, Nokia’s smartphone manufacturing company, HMD Global, partnered with the world’s biggest toymaker Mattel to release the HMD Barbie Phone, a tiny pink feature flip phone resembling the past. It enables its users to make and receive calls and send text messages while it doesn’t support social-networking applications.
The Barbie-pink keypad has other designs such as palm trees, hearts, and flamingos which appear when the keypad is in the dark the firm disclosed. The release occurs on the Barbie doll’s 65th anniversary next year 2024 in line with the movie Barbie 2023.
Ben Wood, chief analyst at research firm CCS Insight said, “I’d imagine quite a few people will be tempted to buy it as a bit of fun. But in reality, everyone is so dependent on their smartphones that anything more than the odd day of detox will be a stretch.”
CCS Insight’s analysis shows that HMD could sell more than 400,000 Barbie phones in the United Kingdom, where it will be sold by Vodafone and Argos. The Nokia feature phones were recently brought to market by the Finnish firm HMD which it has backing from Google’s Alphabet and Qualcomm.