Doro 6820 review: What do you get for the money?
With an asking price of £100, the Doro 6820 isn’t expensive by smartphone standards; but it’s one of the pricier feature phones on the market. For example, the aforementioned Nokia 2660, which focuses on a similar delivery of features, costs £65.
However, hold these two ostensibly similar flip phones side by side and the extra expense at least becomes understandable, if not obvious. The Doro 6820 presents a higher-quality feel, with a plush soft-touch plastic finish to the bottom section and a warm faux leather finish up top.
At 117g, it’s only about 5g lighter than its rival, and with a similar folded size of 107 x 56 x 20mm, it will slip unassumingly into your pocket.
Flip open the phone and you’ll find a familiar physical numerical keyboard on the lower half, with pleasingly tactile and nicely distinguished buttons. It feels nicer to type on than the Nokia, which is another indicator of where that extra money has been spent.
Doro also includes a pair of buttons dedicated to the camera and messaging functions, which is useful. These flank a standard directional pad and an OK button, which form the core of the navigation experience here, along with a pair of context-sensitive menu buttons. Colour-coded call and answer buttons are a welcome intuitive touch, too.
The top half of the phone houses a 2.8in 320 x 240 non-touchscreen display. It’s neither particularly big nor sharp in the grand scheme of things, but it gets brighter than some other flip phones (though more than just the three settings present would have been welcome).
There’s no external display for heads-up information when the phone is closed, unlike the Nokia 2660. All you get on the outside is a 2-megapixel camera and an assistance button.
The latter requires activating in the Settings menu, but once done you can quickly call an emergency number by either pressing and holding, or quickly double-pressing. The phone will cycle through several emergency numbers until one picks up, and you can also set up an automated text message to be sent on such an occasion.
As with many other feature phones, there’s no Wi-Fi connectivity; but then you won’t be doing any web browsing on the Doro 6820. This is a strictly offline device.
The left side of the phone is home to some nicely tactile volume buttons, while the right edge contains a 3.5mm headphone port (for physical headphones) and the micro-USB port. The latter is primarily used for charging, though you can also use it to hook up to a PC if you want to transfer any pictures you’ve taken.
As for charging, one of the most interesting provisions here is a special charging dock. Plug this into a wall, and you’ll be able to charge the Doro 6820 simply by slotting it in. It works rather like a modern wireless home phone, and is far more intuitive than fiddling around with the micro-USB port. You can expect multiple days of battery life from a single charge.
One slight negative that’s worth noting is that the Doro 6820 supports the outdated micro SIM standard, where most phones these days (even feature phones such as the Nokia 2660) go with the smaller nano SIM. It isn’t a huge problem, though: you can ask your operator to supply you with a compatible SIM, or even use a cheap plastic adapter if you already have a nano SIM.
A microSD slot sits alongside that SIM slot, right underneath the removable battery. This is handy given that the phone itself only features a relatively paltry 17.3MB of internal storage.
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