If you long for the Symbian OS days of keypad phones—not the BlackBerry era—but also want a device that can survive whatever life throws at it while still running WhatsApp, Ulefone has your weirdly specific request covered. The rugged device maker’s new Armor Mini 5 4G is a throwback to simpler times, albeit one wrapped in a very tough shell.
Called the Armor Mini 5 4G, it is a keypad Android phone with WhatsApp built in. It is marketed as the “go-to secondary phone” designed for essential communication such as calls and texts, as well as listening to music without getting sucked into the doom-scrolling rabbit hole of social media apps.
The candy-bar-form-factor phone resembles the good’ol feature phone. It is outfitted with a 2.8-inch QVGA touchscreen along with a tactile keypad. Under the hood, it benefits from a MediaTek MT6739 quad-core chipset, bolstered by 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage. The latter is expandable up to 64 GB. It is armed with three card slots: two nano-SIM card slots and one TF card slot.
It has a 2,500 mAh battery—user-removable, of course—while remaining IP68- and IP69K-rated for dust and water resistance, and boasting MIL-STD-810H-level toughness. It is capable of surviving being submerged in up to 2 meters (6.6 feet) of water for up to 30 minutes and shrugging off shocks, including drops from up to 2 meters, vibrations, and extreme temperatures.
I would call it a senior phone, except that it is clearly built for adventure, and it is not quite a feature phone. Though seniors may apply too. The battery offers up to an astonishing 311 hours of standby time, or up to 11 hours of talk time.
The Armor Mini 5 4G runs on Android 11 and features the popular messaging app WhatsApp built in, as well as access to Google Maps, YouTube, and the Play Store. Don’t worry, you will not be caught in the rabbit hole of social media apps because the screen is simply too tiny for extended screen time.
Rounding out the feature list are a 0.3 MP front-facing camera, a 0.3 MP rear camera with flash, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, a built-in FM radio, an onboard speaker that promises loud audio, Bluetooth 2.1, and 4G LTE for fast, reliable connectivity.
The Armor Mini 5 4G is basically an almost-basic phone that happens to be very tough. The Ulefone Armor Mini 5 4G Keypad Android Phone is available now from the Ulefone store at a discounted price of US$99.99 (U.P. US$109.99).
Images: Ulefone.
