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Nokia 1 Review: Best low-end phone ever?

2018-04-11
how do they my name is Gary Sims and this is Android authority now Nokia have made a brilliant comeback into the smartphone market and it seems as if they have a smartphone for every price point now recently they launched the Nokia one they cheapest Android smartphone to date so I got hold of one and let's see what I found out not his naming scheme is simplicity in itself the higher you go the better the phones at the top end you've got kinda like the Nokia sever the Nokia 8 there's even rumors over Nokia 9 if you want something in the middle you might go for a Nokia 510 towards a low end you get the Nokia 3 and now there is the Nokia 1 now the key to the Nokia 1 is its price I'm out to pick up my unit for seventy five euros off contract just from a retail store that translates about a hundred US dollars so as we look at this device everything that we talk about is going to be in the context that this phone costs $100 it doesn't cost two hundred dollars it doesn't cost $400 doesn't cost a hundred it cost just one hundred dollars and yet you'd have Android Oreo 8.1 running on it you've got the full working touchscreen smartphone with GPS and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and everything else you'd expect so what does a hundred bucks buy you well let's find out more so when you look at this phone it certainly is old-school what I mean by over school is you know it's got a removable back it's good removable battery the SIM cards don't go on a tray they kind of go in their own little slots once you take the back off and you can get access to them and it really does look like a phone from maybe 2011-2012 that kind of era and that isn't necessarily a bad thing I actually do like the idea or phone that you can change the batteries I like the idea here to take the back cover off and we have to change it with different back covers but here on the Nokia one what Nokia are really going for is affordability and to do that they need a bit of manufacturing easily which means it's not going to be very particularly complicated with aluminium this and champagne edges that and all wraparound glass the other this is going to be you basic plastic phone with a Popoff back cover and that's fine because you're only paying $100 for it now on the downside of Nokia opting to use the easiest to assemble design is that actually the bezels are quite thick on this thing and that's fine again if you take the hundred-dollar context into consideration but just remember this is not going to be any kind of edge to edge display we're looking at a very very simple design process here there are some plus points Lister's I know as I've said you can now get exchangeable covers which you can which are sold separately by Nokia you can always buy yourself a spare battery and pop that in so if you've got a spare battery with you at any time there are two SIM card slots in the model that I picked up an SD card slot because it's not using the tray you actually can use two as a SIM cards and an SD card or at the same time without any problem so there are advantages to this older way of designing smart phones now moving on to the display this really is a quite a weak display in the sense it's got a very low resolution just 480 by 85 for that kind of sticks it into the realms of phones that we saw as I said earlier 2011 2012 you're not getting great brightness from this display it works indoors perfectly it works outdoors quite well but in strong sunlight you would have trouble reading it well the plus side it is an IPS LCD display which we don't have that problem we have twist the phone you can't see what's on the screen you've got wide viewing angles which is always good and the color reproduction isn't as bad as actually it could be at this price point moving on to the internals here we have kind of the lowest end possible processor available cuz it's again price here is the main thing you've got a quad-core MediaTek device with four cortex a53 cores and the court is a 53 is a 64-bit processor however the version of Android running on this device is actually a 32-bit version of Android there's also a very simple Mali T 7 20 G PU which will handle games like subway surfer I've tried it out it plays quite well but don't expect to be playing any of these high-end sort of first person shooters or any of these complicated 3d games that you can get on the Play Store there's also one gigabyte of RAM and eight gigabytes of internal storage now obviously eight gigabytes is a very small number today again that harkens back to phones of several years ago now what they've knock you have done here is that using Android Go which I'll talk more about in a moment but one of the up shots of using Android Go is actually there is four gigabytes of free space out of that eight gigabytes which is actually pretty amazing my note 8 has 11 gigabytes use just by Android and the pre-installed apps but this so manages to get all that down into kind of round four gigabyte leaving about half of the internal memory free for photos and music and media and apps it's also worth mention this is a 4G phone you've also got Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 on the back of the phone you'll see a small little hole where this external speaker is and the external speaker is really pretty bad it's tinny it lacks depth but it will ring when the phone rings you can hear game music coming through it and you could probably even use the phone on hands-free without it being a terrible terrible experience but don't expect any kind of fidelity here to any music that you'll be listening to I found an option called best loudness in the options in the settings there and I don't really know where it does but I kind of told it or enough a couple of times I think the external speaker sounds better with it off and with the volume clever tapped down a couple of notches so you don't get the distortion pulsing its way through that tiny speaker the good news is when you put in headphones the music quality does improve drastically however the the audio circuits in this phone still lack clarity and there's definitely a lack of punch down in the bass tones the good news is it's a 2150 million power battery which for a phone with only a 4.5 inch display with that low resolution without all with other fancy stuff that goes with it actually gives you a lot of battery life in fact you'll easily get seven hours of on screen time out of this device maybe even eight if you pending on your usage there's no quick charging included however you can charge the phone from zero to 100 percent in about four hours so basically looking at charging it up overnight I remember the days of when Motorola released the first Moto G basically you didn't get anything in the box with the device luckily with the Nokia one you do get a charger you do get a USB cable and you do get some very very simple earbuds the ones without any rubber cups on them just the plastic ones that you put in kind of this whole unit which I can't wear but that's a whole different story and when it comes to software the Nokia one uses Android gonna Android Go is a version of Android that goog will have optimized to work on devices with one gigabyte of ram or less they even say or less I'm Gavin okie one got one gigabyte with Android goes actually quite a pleasant experience there's also some cut-down versions of the popular apps for example there's a gmail go version there is maps go for example which gives you kind of Google Maps a functionality but by the way without any turn-by-turn navigation but you also get the Play Store and the Play Store of course gives you access to all of googles apps including the full version of Gmail including the full version of maps lime install both of those on here and they work absolutely fine as well what's also talking about the Play Store version is it will recommend for you apps that are particularly tuned light apps or go apps that are particularly tuned for Android go so that's good well you've got a choice to make it will recommend one that works better on these low-end devices other than that it's a pretty vanilla Android experience which is good there's no skins on top there's no thing to slow the phone down in that way and also there's a couple of other neat built-in features for example there is a data saving option and you can actually switch that on in chrome so that you can get your data compress before it comes down to your phone of course the idea is here's if you're on a plan from your carrier that doesn't have much data included into it you're not wasting it on downloading kind of data from the internet but the downside is this data has to go first of all to Google servers will then be compressed and then it it's sent down to your device so there it could be a privacy concern there for you also Android go is very friendly toward SD card which is absolutely fantastic because Google for so long I've kind of not wanted us to use SD cards at all but here in Android go because they know they're aiming for a particular market where people might not have large access to data plans or they might not have high-speed access to the Internet this device actually is very friendly toward SD cuz when you pop in an SD card it will say do want me to turn this into internal storage which you can say yes you can also opt for it to be portable storage and if you pick internal storage then it's actually fairly easy to move apps and data from the actual internal storage over to the SD card by kind of going into the settings finding the app and saying move so it moves over to the internal soldier and that's a great way or be able to expand the internal storage on the Nokia while it actually support up to 128 gigabytes microSD cards and finally we come to the camera base you got a 5 megapixel shooter on the back two megapixel shooter on the front and it will record in 720p HD now the camera is not very good I'm there's nothing more I can say about it it's slow there's very little features in the end the app that comes with it it will take photos I found that if I kind of clicked you know and took the photo and then moved too quickly afterwards just after I've clicked it then you kind of get ghosting so I learned to have to kind of click and then wait hold my breaths not move the phone and then move on and that did improve the quality of the photos from dramatically but basically it's gonna be OK for emergency situations and it's ok if you've got no other camera whatsoever you this is your first smartphone then you know it's better than nothing at all but don't expect much in the way from these cameras and so there you have it now the context again here is the price for $100 or 75 euros you can't really compare it to devices that are much more expensive I didn't even bother to benchmark this thing because I know there's no point in quoting the numbers question is can you use it is it usable and the answer is yes if you don't have the money for a more expensive smartphone then this is a great way to get into the connected world of Android you can add this to the Play Store you've got Wi-Fi you've got Bluetooth you've got 4G okay you can take photos you can play games you can use social media it's a great way your first step onto this ladder personally my recommendation would be if you have a bit more money then go for the Nokia 3 Nokia 3 it's got a better display a better processor better everything basically and it it's more expensive but it's not much much more expensive so in your market do look out for the difference in the price and the Nokia 1 and the Nokia free if you can't afford the Nokia 3 or similar phones and you want a smart phone definitely get the Nokia 1 but there are limitations and you have to know those limitations well my name is Gary Sims and this is Andrea authoritative Inu please do give it a thumbs up you also know what else I'm going to ask you subscribe hit the bell icon leave a comment below and well that's it I'll see you the next one
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