Overview of the Nokia X smartphone

Nokia fans loved to lament that the Finnish company was completely at the mercy of Microsoft and stubbornly ignored Android. Everyone agreed that the manufacturer knows how to make beautiful and high-tech smartphones, but Windows Phone stops users from buying Lumia.

The aspirations of Nokia fans and numerous rumors about "spare" The company's plan was confirmed at the Mobile Electronics Show in Barcelona. The Finns have done something they seem to have kept aloof from during the entire period of close cooperation with Microsoft - at MWC they presented X-series smartphones running a heavily redesigned, but still Android.

It is curious that Nokia did not fight for the top segment and did not even dare to enter the middle price range. Finnish Android devices are aimed at users who value every dollar, euro or ruble. Today we'll take a look at Nokia X, the cheapest smartphone based on Google's OS presented by the Finns, and try to find out how it is better or worse than its many Android competitors.

Design

Once again, let's pay tribute to Nokia designers - the company's phones are easily identified among devices from other manufacturers. And Nokia X is no exception. It's easy to mistake the smartphone for another Windows Phone model, especially if you leave the screen off.

The novelty by all appearance makes it clear that we have one of the junior devices of the Lumia series. There are more similarities with the same than with last year's Asha touchscreens. In terms of dimensions, the device is also as close as possible to the younger Nokia WP-smartphone.

Unlike the Lumia 520, the Nokia X has well defined, sharp edges. Thanks to this, the device looks like a small brick. We liked the design and execution of the device. In black, he looks strictly and, despite "cutting" ribs, fits well in the hand due to its small size.

Plastic also leaves a pleasant impression, the matte surface of which resembles the polycarbonate of more expensive models. Respect deserves a high-quality assembly - there is no hint of play or other defect in inexpensive devices, Nokia X not only looks, but also feels like a cast bar.

At first glance, it may seem that the phone is made in a non-separable case. This is wrong. To open the lid, you will have to cunningly cling to the smartphone and gently press your fingers in the upper part from the back. Such a solution is extremely inconvenient and impractical, but it guarantees the solidity of the structure. Of course, frequently change the battery, memory card and "sims", of which two are supported here, you don't want to.

The power and volume buttons are on the right side. They protrude above the surface of the case by about one and a half to two millimeters, they are perfectly groped and pressed. There are no complaints about them.

We liked everything about the appearance and performance of Nokia X. There is a small drawback in the form of an inconveniently opening panel, but this is not so significant against the background of the general positive impression that the device leaves. Really and "inside" will everything be just as good?

Display

Nokia X uses a 4-inch IPS-matrix with a resolution of 480*800 pixels. The screen is inexpensive, the dark areas of the image on it, when the angle of inclination is changed, noticeably give off a purple tint. This, however, is not critical. The brightness of the backlight is enough to ensure that the display remains more or less readable outdoors in bright light. Models with ClearBlack are far away, but do not forget that we are talking about a budget device.

Another sign of savings was the lack of an oleophobic coating. Your phone will need to be cleaned frequently and thoroughly if you want it to look neat. Exactly the same feature, we recall, is inherent in the younger Nokia WP-smartphone - Lumia 520.

The screen of Nokia X is not bad, but nothing more. Among the models running Android, there are many samples with a larger display and higher resolution. Take, for example, or Alcatel One Touch X Pop.

Functionality

The Finnish manufacturer carefully hides any mention of Android 4.1, replacing it with some platform Nokia X 1. The developers have tried to make the interface as much as possible "tiled" and similar to WP. Perhaps they were in too much of a hurry, because everything turned out extremely badly.

The first suspicions arise at a cursory glance at the lock screen. Here you can clearly see an attempt to make Android similar to Windows Phone. In addition to information about active SIM cards, current time, date and battery level, oblong tiles with the latest events (messages about the presence of an update, download completion, missed calls, etc.) are displayed here.

The main screen in Nokia X is only one. Everything that is possible is dumped here in the form of tiles: programs, a phone book, an application store, a gallery, etc. All this must be scrolled down to infinity, or rather, to the end of the list of all downloaded goodness.

Fortunately, shortcuts can be dropped into folders. Also available is the function of changing the background color and size of a particular tile. True, when you try to change at least something in the standard design, the smartphone slows down so that sometimes it’s even difficult to understand what will happen in the next moment - will the icon fit in the folder or, twitching, slip through it?

We make a scrolling movement from right to left and get into the so-called Fastlane screen. Recent user actions are displayed here, whether it is launching a program, making a call, or saving a screenshot. Do not think of Fastlane as a task manager with multitasking support - trying to open a recently closed application will restart it. Nokia X is too weak "iron” to keep open programs in memory.

The smartphone does not have many of the usual services from Google. The Finns did their best to replace them with third-party ones like their own app store. In terms of content, the catalog is very, very far from Google Play. But you can use Nokia partner stores, for example "Yandex". By the way, after the very first downloads of completely harmless programs, some malicious software settled on our copy of the device, disguised as an official store and calling for immediate download of some nonsense.

It is not known what the developers were guided by, leaving Nokia X with one control key - a button "Back" below the screen. This did not make the Finnish smartphone look like an iPhone, but users of Android devices who are accustomed to three or even four touch buttons will at least be discouraged by this approach.

Most of all, in the Nokia X software shell, it’s not the wild interface, not the terrible abbreviations of Russian-language inscriptions, but the terrible slowdowns that irritate. It happens that you scroll through the screen, but it does not respond, and only after a couple of seconds it starts to reluctantly crawl in the right direction. The year is 2014, but Nokia X seems to return to the distant past, when smartphones were not so much smart as slow.

A third-party shell that turns Nokia X into a more or less normal Android smartphone

If you managed to buy this device, it's better to immediately install a third-party shell (it's much faster!), And replenish the supply of applications by installing .apk files yourself. Also don't forget to turn off the tapping wake-up feature - it works completely random anyway. Once Nokia X was in a bag, somehow managed to unlock it, start the game and in a couple of hours "eat" battery.

Camera

The smartphone is equipped with a 3-megapixel camera without autofocus. Another hello from the past when a sign "cool" phone was the very fact of having at least some kind of photomodule.

Sometimes, in pictures taken with Nokia X, you can even see quite small details (like windows in a high-rise building). But in general, the photos do not stand up to criticism. For a long time we have not seen a smartphone, even a budget one, shoot like that.

Performance and battery life

And here Nokia demonstrates respectable consistency. The hardware component of the device was outdated the year before last. The model is based on a Qualcomm MSM8225 dual-core chip, which was released in early 2012.

Fitting an Android device with just 512MB of RAM takes a lot of guts, which Nokia seems to have in abundance. The amount of built-in memory is 4 GB. It's good that there is a microSD slot.

Running a Full HD video is out of the question. However, for a display with such a resolution, this is an extra luxury. HD movies slow down from time to time, but generally remain watchable. We have already mentioned that the smartphone shamelessly slows down in "native" menu. Run on Nokia X "heavy" the game is not worth trying, he can only do something like Angry Birds.

The device is equipped with a 1500 mAh battery. A full charge is enough for a day of moderate activity. In our standard test with the wireless modules turned off and the brightness set to maximum, the device lasted less than three hours when playing HD video - a low result even against the background of cheaper competitors.

conclusions

Nokia X is a prime example of when the form does not match the content, just like in the case of Dr. Frankenstein's monster. But in the Finnish device, the appearance turned out to be more than worthy, and the inside turned out to be obscenely ugly.

During testing of the device, we got the impression that with this model the manufacturer wants to instill an aversion to Android to those users who first got acquainted with this OS on the unsuccessful example of Nokia X. Who knows, suddenly after that they will switch to Windows Phone.

Separately, it is worth mentioning the price. If Nokia X cost less than $100, all its shortcomings could be ignored. However, we sell the phone at twice the price. For the same $200, the device has a lot of competitors from Huawei, Alcatel, Lenovo, ZTE, Fly and many other Chinese manufacturers. However, they do not need "finish" by installing Google services and changing "buggy" shell. The novelty from Nokia can only count on the ardent love of the most devoted fans and on the interest of individual geeks who will be curious to try to turn a non-smartphone into something similar to an Android model.
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