Nokia 1 Review

Nokia 1 is a brand new smartphone from the well-known company that’s been with us for quite some time. In April of 2018, Nokia released its strongest and its weakest smartphone on the market. While the strongest is Nokia 8 Sirocco, the stripped-down version is exactly this one. Nokia 1 is aimed towards non-demanding users that aren’t keen on spending tons of money on a flagship phone. This could be one of the best low-end phones on the market, at this moment. Since I don’t trust specs that much, it’s time to find out more about this phone in the review below.

Design and Build Quality

Nokia 1 comes with a design that’s everything but modern. Some say that we have a front side made of glass, but hey… I don’t think so! What I would say about this phone is that it’s completely plastic. On the front, we have a 4.5-inch IPS display and the huge bezels. While the upper bezel is filled with a loudspeaker and a front camera, I wonder why do we have a huge bezel on the bottom and not even the fingerprint sensor. The back of the phone is also simplistic since we don’t have any advanced features.

To be precise, we have a rear camera with the LED flash and Nokia logo in the middle. The speaker is located on the lower right side of the back. It’s pretty obvious that the left-handed people are going to have some trouble with it since it can be covered pretty easily. You can see that Nokia simply loves right-handed buyers! The build quality also isn’t great. As Nokia 1 is made of plastic, I could hear some cracking while clenching it and the back of the phone isn’t very quality.

Display

Nokia 1 comes with a 4.5″ LCD IPS display with a resolution of 480×854. Before we continue to review it, let me just mention how mad I am at Nokia because of this. In the year 2018, it’s simply not acceptable to put a shitty display on a not-so-good phone, you know? Even though the phone is relatively cheap (around a hundred bucks), a 720p display would be much better. At least, we have an IPS panel and not the TFT one, which would prevent me from writing this review. Quality-wise, it’s everything you expected (or didn’t expect).

While the viewing angles are acceptable, I simply can’t get over the lack of sharpness here. You’ll agree that 4.5 inches aren’t something to brag about, but still, this resolution isn’t suited for any screen size anymore. On the brighter side, the colors aren’t that bad, albeit not impressive. Furthermore, the display isn’t great in the daylight, too. We simply can’t say this is a great display, but that’s what you get at this price. Some compromises must be made!

Camera

If you turn your phone around, you’ll see the tiny 5 MP camera lurking around. Yeah, this bad boy is really small and I don’t know which size is this sensor but it’s not big. Of course, it’s what you would expect from this kind of phone. The camera comes with the bare-bones features that aren’t that impressive. If you are looking forward to taking some decent photos with this one, you may be as disappointed as we are. The photos are sometimes blurry and the important details are simply not that prevalent.

For those worried about the video quality, you should be worried! If you didn’t know, it’s the year 2005 and we have a 480p video recording which is a cutting-edge technology! Jokes aside, the video quality isn’t really worth mentioning – that’s all we have to say. The front-facing 2 MP camera is also not something to brag about. But, for occasional selfies, it’s still a good bang for the buck.

Performance

Nokia 1 comes with Android 8.0 Oreo which is more than great for the price. It’s a rare thing that’s good about this phone. And although this great news, the hardware that pushes this software isn’t that good. We are dealing with a dated MediaTek MT6737M chipset that’s been here for quite some time. Alongside quad-core CPU and Mali-T720, we also have 1GB of RAM. With all of this, Nokia 1 offers bare-bones performance in almost any compartment.

The gaming on this phone is clunky, slow, and many games aren’t even going to work at all! You can, however, use it for some casual gaming but installing games is the pain in the ass, due to 8GB of ROM. The multitasking is also a thought noun as the low amount of RAM is going to give you problems. As we said earlier, this phone isn’t for this kind of stuff. It’s a phone that’s great for the below-average users or those who are just getting into the Android world.

Battery and Speaker

If Nokia 1 is good at one thing, it’s the battery. It comes with a removable Li-Ion 2150 mAh battery that can last you a long time. On top of that, it’s removable! Isn’t it marvelous? As much as it sounds lackluster on the paper, 2150 mAh is more than enough to give this phone some juice. Since it has weak hardware and a low-res display, this battery will last you more than one day without charging.

In the beginning, we mentioned the speaker that has a weird placing. Well, not only that, but the quality is bad, too. Because you’ll constantly cover it with your hand, you might be better off purchasing high-quality headphones for music, videos, and multimedia.

Verdict

Nokia 1 isn’t exactly a Numero Uno. While it comes with Android 8.0, which is great, this phone has some serious issues surrounding it. The display is heavily dated, the hardware is weak, and the overall performance isn’t anything to admire. On the good side, Nokia 1 is simple to use, it has a great battery and you can remove it, too! If you don’t care about the smartphone trends and want a phone that’s great for the basic stuff, Nokia 1 is great at its price of a hundred bucks.