This is a short review of the Nokia 6300 4g.

Overall it’s fine, but there are better dumbphones available depending on what you’re after. For a super-basic dumbphone try the Nokia 105, or for something more advanced, the Qin F21 Pro.

Verdict: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)

Table of Contents

introduction

The Nokia 6300 4G is a budget dumbphone phone released in early 2021, and priced around $70 USD.

Make no mistake, this is not the same “Nokia” company as 20 years ago. In 2016 the “Nokia” brand name was bought out by HMD, which uses it to market it’s own low-cost phones (with low-cost hardware and build quality).

Beyond the obvious basics like calls and texts, a big selling point of the Nokia 6300 was it’s support for KaiOS 2.5, which included support for smart apps like Whatsapp and Facebook. Unfortunately, KaiOS is basically dead and as of Feb 2025, KaiOS will lose Whatsapp support.

I spent about a month using the Nokia 6300 day-to-day, and between the average build quality, atrocious camera and poor software experience, it’s quite difficult to recommend this phone. I go into some more details below.

hardware

Buildwise, the Nokia 6300 4G features a simple plastic design, which feels fairly sturdy once the 1500 mAh battery is installed. Don’t be fooled though. Drops and falls will damage this device — this isn’t the same Nokia we once knew — and even without those, people occasionally report build quality issues like dodgy keypad inputs.

This phone has a fine-looking 2.4-inch display, a basic 0.3-megapixel camera on the back, and a bright flash that can be used as a torch.

The camera quality is atrocious. At 0.3 megapixels it really should have just been left off the phone, or upgraded to a basic 2MP sensor. I’ve included the best photo I managed to take with it in the camera samples section if you’re interested.

The call quality is fine, and the battery life is solid, lasting up to a week with light usage. This phone supports a decent array of network frequencies which gives it decent compatibility with 3g and 4g networks around the world (you should check your specific region), and you can use this phone to create a Wifi Hotspot in a pinch, using your LTE connection.

camera sample

Here’s a photo sample from the Nokia 6300 4g, and a comparison with the same photo captured on my iPhone 13 Pro.

Nokia 6300 4g	iPhone 13 Pro

Of course this is an unfair comparison! I’m not expecting a cheap dumphone to take photos with the same quality as an expensive smartphone, but I want to make sure people know how big a downgrade it is, in case they’re coming from a smartphone.

software

Like I mentioned earlier, this phone runs KaiOS 2.5, which gives it support for some basic smart apps via the KaiOS app store. For some people this might be great, but the few smart apps I tried were pretty average. For example, the Google Maps app doesn’t support live navigation — it’s just a list of directions to follow. This is despite the Nokia 6300 4g having a built-in GPS module; It’s a limitation of the KaiOS app, not the hardware.

The phone itself also comes with quite a lot of bloatware pre-installed — apps like Facebook and YouTube, plus a bunch of random “free trial” games. To remove any of these preinstalled apps, you’ll need to root this phone by following this guide.

The everyday functionality is average — the UI does occasionally lag or glitch, and while this phone does support predictive text typing with the keypad, it defaults to regular T9 input. You’ll need to press the # key a few times, every time you want to type with predictive text, which get’s old fast. There are a couple of handy apps and features, like a timer app and a flashlight feature using the rear camera flash.

conclusion - very average.

I don’t recommend the Nokia 6300 4g for most people. It sits in this ugly middle zone — too smart to be a true “dumb phone”, but too dumb to be a “smart dumb phone”. Coupled with KaiOS dying a slow death, and there’s not much going for this phone.

There are better options out there depending on what features you need and your budget — consider taking a look at our dumbphone finder to explore other dumbphones.