Nuu F4l Flip Phone Review

Nuu bites off a little more than it can chuu with the F4L ($79.99), an Android-powered flip phone with sluggish performance. I appreciate that the F4L supports WhatsApp for superior messaging, but it could use a bit more thought in the software and oomph in the hardware. For $10 less, get the Nokia 6300 4G, which lacks the flip-phone aesthetic but is a more capable device.

A Basic Phone for Basic Needs

Who's Nuu? Nuu is the US brand of a Chinese phone maker, also known as Sun Cupid, that has been in the electronics business since 1979. It's been kicking around the edges of the US mobile phone market for years now, putting out flip phones and low-cost Android smartphones. We've reviewed Nuu phones as far back as 2015. The F4L is Verizon-certified, and is sold by US Mobile.

Person holding an open black flip phone to their face

This flip phone is on the large side.

The F4L is a relatively anonymous-looking, squarish black flip phone measuring 4.29 by 2.28 by 0.82 inches (HWD) and weighing 4.5 oz. On the front are a 2MP camera, a 1.77-inch 160-by-120 screen, and two little icons: an envelope that flashes green if you have a text, and a battery that flashes red if yours is low.

Open it to find a 320-by-240, 2.8-inch LCD; a selfie camera lens, which is a rare treat on a flip phone, though it's only VGA; and number and cursor pads of well separated, rubbery keys. The keys take a bit more effort to press than those on the Kyocera DuraVX Extreme, the Sonim XP3, or the Sunbeam F1 (our three favorite flip phones). The back cover and battery are removable.

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The screen is large and bright by flip phone standards.

Like most flip phones, the F4L isn't waterproof or ruggedized. (For that, upgrade to a Kyocera or a Sonim.) But also like most flip phones, it's mostly made of a relatively bouncy plastic material that's less likely to crack than smartphone glass.

Acceptable Calling

I tested the F4L with US Mobile, a low-cost provider that works on both the Verizon and T-Mobile networks. The firm has a talk-and-text plan that's as low as $10 a month; it's a great deal. With US Mobile SIMs on both networks, as well as with standard Verizon and T-Mobile SIMs, the F4L had no trouble finding good VoLTE connections.

The F4L has frequency bands 2/4/5/12/13/17/66, so it will work well on Verizon but will lack some T-Mobile coverage where that carrier uses rural band 71. If you're looking for a low-cost voice phone with band 71, check out the Nokia 6300 4G. Mediocre signal reception is to be expected for a phone in this price bracket. As is common among low-end voice phones, the F4L supports HD calling but not the higher level of HD called EVS. (For that, you need to step up to a $200+ Kyocera phone.)

Earpiece and speaker volume, at 90.4dB and 88.4dB respectively, fell in the middle of the range of recently tested voice phones. A mere five ringtones are included—all piercing and loud—but you can use your own MP3s or record your own sounds. A standard 3.5mm headset jack on the side invites wired headsets; you can also use Bluetooth.

Battery life is about average; in our tests, the battery ran down after 6 hours, 17 minutes of talk time or about three days of standby time.

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Wi-Fi calling is supported, and the F4L can serve as a Wi-Fi hotspot. Like other phones of its kind, it has a basic LTE modem and only 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. Hotspot speeds on the T-Mobile network were very similar to the Nokia 6300 4G's, at 19.1Mbps down and 24.6Mbps up. That sounds pretty good, but a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra sitting right next to the voice phones showed 172Mbps down and 49Mbps up. If you're used to a smartphone's hotspot, a voice phone's will feel pretty throttled.

A Low-End Chipset

The main problem with the F4L is that it's slow. There are often multi-second delays when you try to open or close apps, including the browser and the dialer. That's because the phone uses Mediatek's underpowered MT6731 chipset, which is clearly struggling under Nuu's Android 8.1–based MyOS platform. Sunbeam's F1 outperforms the F4L by stepping up a notch to the MT6739 chipset, which has better performance.

MyOS has relatively fixed features. The three apps are the Android web browser, Facebook Lite, and WhatsApp. You're not required to set them up, but you can't delete them or add any new apps. There's no maps app, unlike on the Nokia 6300 4G and the Sunbeam F1.

Phone screen showing the home screen, with several icons and a blue background

The home screen has a basic feature-phone layout.

WhatsApp is the stopgap solution to a problem with the F4L's texting app. As on many phones using Android 8.1–based OSes, the text app handles group messages poorly; in this case, when you reply to a group, your message is sent once to each person, so it shows up multiple times in your message history. (Five people? Five duplicate messages.) WhatsApp fixes that with coherent group messaging, along with voice and video calling over any network or Wi-Fi.

Its interface is awkward, though. When you launch WhatsApp, you go into a mode where you're moving a mouse pointer with your cursor pad. For example, rather than press the Up key to pick a menu option at the top of the screen, you have to hold it down to move the little mouse pointer up to the option you want. It's a poor implementation of an interface intended for touch screens.

WhatsApp assumes you have a touch screen, and is clunky if you don't.

You can write texts with triple-tap or predictive text. There's no voice-to-text option like on the Nokia 6300 4G or the Sunbeam F1, and you can't send little voice clips like you can on the Punkt MP02's Pigeon (Signal) app.

Media options include an onboard FM radio (which requires wired headphones as an antenna) and music and video players that play files stored in the 4GB of internal storage or on a microSD card.

The phone has standard volume buttons and a 3.5mm jack on the side.

Unusually for a voice phone, there are two cameras: the 2MP main lens and VGA selfie lens. Both turn out fuzzy and often over-bright photos, but you'll get considerably more image detail with the 2MP camera than on phones like the Nokia 225 4G and the Nokia 6300 4G that only have VGA primary cameras.

The F4L uses a company called Adups for its software updates. Adups has a shady history, but Nuu gave me solid assurances that it's cleaned up its act. You can read more details in our story on voice phone data security.

The F4L Fails to Fail, But It Doesn't Stand Out

It's hard to get excited about the F4L. It's fine, for the price; it makes calls well, and WhatsApp adds the needed group-messaging chops that aren't present in the basic SMS app. But its all-around sluggishness and interface awkwardness make me even less enthusiastic about it than I am about the admittedly slow Nokia 6300 4G.

The F4L's major perk is that it costs less than $100. At that price, your choices for Verizon-compatible voice phones are mostly other mediocre devices; we haven't covered most of them, but they get poor user reviews on Verizon's site. I'd give the edge to the $69.99 Nokia 6300 4G, as its KaiOS operating system is a bit better designed to be used with a 9-pad, and its speech-to-text function gives a major usability boost. Or splurge on the stripped-down Sunbeam F1 ($195) or the rugged Kyocera DuraVX Extreme ($240), our two top picks for Verizon-compatible voice phones; they're more expensive, but you get so much more bang for your buck.

Nuu F4L

The Bottom Line

The Nuu F4L is an adequate low-cost flip phone, but it doesn't go beyond the basics of calling and texting.

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