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- Stripped-back, user-friendly interface
- Dedicated UK-based helpline
- Thoughtfully designed accessibility features
- There are cheaper smartphones
- Unnecessary and mediocre backup cameras
- The bundled charger is very slow
The Chatsie Phone is one of a very small number of handsets designed to make smartphones more accessible to older users. Simple phones for older people aren’t a completely new concept, of course. But where most of the competition are either more rudimentary feature phones or cheap, no-nonsense smartphones, the Chatsie Phone is being positioned as the best of both worlds.
So we have the improved functionality and additional screen space of a smartphone, but the focus is still firmly on accessibility, with plenty of features designed to empower those with limited tech knowledge, vision impairments and hand mobility issues.
And it all comes together fairly nicely. There are cheaper feature phones that do a similar job, but they lack access to useful NHS and banking apps. If you want your older loved one to be able to manage things like their appointments and payments, the Chatsie Phone is your best bet for introducing them to the smartphone experience.
Chatsie Phone review: What you need to know
At its heart, the Chatsie Phone is a stripped-back smartphone that’s designed to offer a simplified and accessible experience for older and less tech-savvy users.
That means no overly complicated menus, a simple, text-based homescreen, shortcuts to the most-needed functions like favourited callers and frequently used apps, and a dedicated, UK-based helpline that can help straighten things out if you do get in a pickle.
There are plenty of other features designed to empower the older user, too, including adjustable font sizes that go up to the largest on any smartphone around, a dictation option for texting to save your aching thumbs, and the ability to have one of your trusted loved ones remotely view your phone and talk you through any issue you may be having.
The phone also comes with a silicone case and sturdy screen protector as standard, helping to avoid scratches and drop damage, and the box includes a charging cable and wall plug (the latter of which is increasingly uncommon among modern smartphones). There’s even a stylus included for those who might find it difficult to type.
Price and competition
You have two choices when buying the Chatsie Phone. The first is to buy the phone SIM-free for £249 and pair it with one of our favourite mobile networks.
Alternatively, you can get the phone with a SIM preinstalled for £159 upfront and £15/mth for 24 months. For that, you’re getting a SIM from Honest Mobile (operating over the Three network) with unlimited calls/texts and 4GB of monthly 5G data.
Most of our recommended phones for older people are feature phones with smaller screens and physical buttons. If calls and texts are your only priority, there are some great options under £100: the Nokia 2660 Flip is currently £56, or, if you have concerns about the user finding flip phones too fiddly, the Doro 5860 is only £68.
Otherwise, there are a handful of excellent smartphones in this price range, but these lack the senior-focused features. The CMF Phone 2 Pro is our current budget pick, and is available for £215 at the time of writing.
Design and key features
Beneath the Chatsie software and branding, the phone is a Telekom T Phone Pro (hence the logo on the back of the phone) that measures 78 x 9 x 174mm (WDH) and weighs 214g. That’s a little on the thick and heavy side for a modern smartphone (most around this price are closer to 8mm thick and weigh under 200g), but not to the point that it’s uncomfortable to use.
The frame of the phone is matte aluminium and the rear is frosted, navy blue plastic, with a low-profile camera module in the top-left corner. On the right edge of the phone, we’ve got the volume and power buttons, with the latter also doubling as a fingerprint reader – both this and the face unlocking via the selfie camera are optional, however, so there’s no need to set them up if you think the additional barrier will deter your loved one from using the phone.
The left edge is home to the SIM card tray, which also has a slot that takes microSD cards. This allows you to expand the 256GB of internal storage by up to 2TB, which is plenty of room for all those grandkid photos. Finally, the bottom edge has our USB-C charging port, a speaker grille and a 3.5mm jack for plugging in wired headphones.
I’ll get into the specifics of the user interface below, but the software is generally very accessible; it’s based on Android 14, with Chatsie’s custom OS sitting over the top. The interface is a little shoddy in places – it takes a second to appear over the standard Android screen upon boot, and some words get cut off when you use the maximum font size, for instance – but for the most part, it’s easy to get to grips with and, crucially, to navigate.
Display
The massive LCD display measures 6.82in across the diagonal and has a 1,640 x 720 resolution and a 60Hz refresh rate. It isn’t colour accurate – the average Delta E colour variance score of 3.13 is a long way from our target of 1 or under – but it performs well in the ways that matter for its target audience.
In particular, the contrast and black levels were excellent in my testing, measuring 1,749:1 and 0.22cd/m2, respectively. Those are both stronger than most LCD screens around this price, and help the text and icons to stand out from the display, making the phone that much more accessible for those with impaired vision.
Brightness is decent, as well. On the default manual mode, it topped out at 412cd/m2 in my testing, while switching to adaptive brightness and shining a torch on the light sensor nudged it up to a peak of 425cd/m2. That’s not the brightest around but it’s decent enough to keep the screen readable on bright days.
An argument could be made for making the adaptive brightness the mode the phone ships in. This would circumvent the user having to dig through the settings to find the brightness options when out in the sunshine, However, I could see some users finding shifts in screen brightness disconcerting and thinking their phone was playing up, so neither approach is without drawbacks.
User interface
The main goal of the Chatsie Phone is to present a simple interface that won’t confound or frustrate older users, and in that regard, it does its job very well.
Where most smartphones populate their homescreens with a smattering of colourful apps, the Chatise Phone’s layout is primarily text-based, with clearly labelled options for making phone calls, sending/reading texts, checking voicemail, and so on.
These simple labels are very easy to parse – particularly helpful if the user is suffering from impaired vision or cognitive decline – and keep the homescreen simple and straightforward. You still have access to the Google Play Store and all of its apps, of course, and you can download any that you want and add them as shortcuts on the homescreen.
If you get turned around at any point, you have a permanent back button at the bottom of the screen and when you open an app, a menu button pops up next to the back button, giving you a quick route back to the homescreen.
In the settings, you also have the “help” section, which is where you can generate a code that allows your trusted friend or family member to view your screen remotely and help talk you through the issue. This is essentially just screen sharing and doesn’t allow the other person to control your screen remotely – rather, they can simply see what you see and help to point you in the right direction.
Perhaps my favourite feature on the Chatsie Phone is the text dictation. The option is presented clearly when you go to send a text and I found it to be very effective. I tried it out with plenty of stammering, repeating and correcting myself, and the end result was impressively coherent – I can see this being particularly helpful to users with arthritis or Parkinson’s, or even those who simply find texting laborious and frustrating.
Performance and battery life
The Chatsie Phone runs on a MediaTek Dimensity 700 chipset with a peak clock speed of 2.2GHz, backed up by 6GB of RAM and 128GB of built-in storage. Put head-to-head with similarly priced smartphones in the Geekbench 6 CPU tests, you can see that the Chatsie isn’t the fastest phone available for this kind of money but it’s still decent enough. Most importantly, I found navigating through the menus and opening apps efficient.
In our standard looping video test, the Chatsie Phone lasted for a solid 18hrs 50mins, which isn’t the best you can get for this price but will get you through a day of moderate use. More to the point, the intended audience here likely won’t rack up that much daily screentime and the phone does a decent job at holding its battery while sitting idle – after leaving it alone for the weekend, the battery only dropped by around 5%.
I appreciate Chatsie including a charger in the box, but it’s very slow. Despite the phone supporting charging speeds of up to 15W, the provided charger only charges at 5W. This got the battery from empty to 25% in a hour, while swapping out for a faster charger saw it hit 61% in the same timeframe. If you have no alternative, the bundled charger is a decent inclusion but if you have another plug, odds are it’s faster.
Cameras
It’s rare that I’ll criticise a phone for having too many cameras but, considering that the mission statement here is simplicity above all else, I think the Chatsie Phone only needed one rear camera.
The 50-megapixel main lens is perfectly adequate for this price, producing images with bold colours and solid detail in good lighting conditions…
… and even managing passable shots after dark – so long as there’s an artificial light source nearby, that is.
There did not, however, need to be three further lenses on the back. Given that I expect most users will stick to the main camera, it feels like you’re paying for wholly unnecessary extra lenses here.
And they’re not even particularly good cameras. The 5-megapixel ultrawide has a decent enough colour tone but the detail is understandably lacking.
And the 2-megapixel macro and depth sensors are so weedy they’re barely worth mentioning. The option to shoot macro focus is buried in the camera menu and when you find it, the results are unimpressive.
Finally, we’ve got a 16-megapixel camera just above the display, which is perfectly serviceable for video calls and the odd selfie, and both the front and rear cameras shoot 1080p video at 30fps.
Chatsie Phone review: Verdict
If the intended recipient of this phone already has experience with smartphones and gets on alright with them, I’d advise saving a bit of money and going for something like the CMF Phone 2 Pro – it’s a far superior smartphone and can be set up with a very easy-to-use Android interface.
As an introduction to the smartphone format for those who are hesitant to use them, however, the Chatsie Phone is unlike anything else available right now. The simple layout is about as user-friendly as a smartphone can get, with the strong text being particularly accommodating of those with vision issues, and the other accessibility features offer greater potential for independence to those with reduced hand mobility.
If you’ve been trying to convince an elderly relative to give smartphones a go with no success thus far, the Chatsie Phone should be your next port of call.
