What is it?
It’s a pretty basic Nokia smartphone. It runs off quite a slow processor, the Qualcomm QM215, with 1GB of Ram and a replaceable 3,000 Mah battery.
The LCD display is 5.7-inches. It can be unlocked with a face scanner. There’s not much in the way of features, but it does have a jack for plugging in wired headphones.
You get a measly 16GB of data, of which only 9.86GB is usable. There is an SD card slot for extending this though.
It’s not NFC (near-field communication) enabled, so you won’t be able to use Google Pay on this phone.
What’s it like to use?
Operating this phone is quite a frustrating experience. The processor is pretty slow, which makes navigating around the menu more taxing than it should be. It is at least easy to set up and add your Google Mail account, although you’ll be irritated again when you come to write an email due to the delayed and unreliable touchscreen response.
The display is more low-res than we’ve come to expect from a smartphone. Bluish colours come through and dominate the display, so it doesn’t look as appealing as models from other brands. However, it’s not too difficult to read the screen whether you’re inside in the bright sun or in a gloomy room.
One thing this phone does well is call clarity. Although your voice can sound muffled when you’re in a busy room with lots of noise, overall it’s fine to have a conversation.
How long does the battery last?
Nokia’s simple phones gained a reputation for their brilliant battery life, but this hasn’t translated to this smartphone. You only get 17.5 hours to play with, and turning the brightness down only buys you an extra hour on top of that.
It also takes an age to fully charge. You’ll need to wait for three hours and 15 minutes for 100%, and charging for 15 minutes only gets you to 11%, which is barely enough to pop out for a couple of hours.
How good are the cameras?
Not good at all. Compared with other smartphones, this Nokia doesn’t have a lot to work with: just one 8Mp and one 5Mp wide angle lens on the front and back. The rear camera takes blurry and dark photos in low light, with or without the flash on. Daylight pictures aren’t much better and portraits look artificial with poor separation between the subject and the background.
The front camera makes your selfies look tinted and grainy. No setting makes your pictures turn out well, but they’re the worst in dim light without the flash on.
Videos also lose colour and look very dark. The front camera is a disaster – there’s no image stabilisation so as well as the colours looking awful, videos come out blurry and shaky.
Is there anything I should watch out for?
The face recognition is practically unusable. It failed multiple times in our test, even in the easiest light conditions.
The speakers aren’t terrible, but the sound is very thin and compressed, so your music won’t sound at its best when played through this phone.
Is there anything else I should know?
It’s pretty durable (though you’ll want to get rid of it long before it breaks). The body doesn’t scratch easily and it can survive a sudden burst of rain without losing functionality.
Nokia does a good job of keeping the information it asks for to a minimum, and we’re confident that your personal data is safely secure.
Should I buy it?
Due to the age of this phone and the brand’s update policies, we suspect it will stop receiving important security updates in less than a year, so we can’t recommend that you buy. Find out more in our guide to mobile phone security.
