Nokia X Review

Nokia X Review

This kind of setup is enough to confuse most users. Along with this mix of Microsoft services, Windows Phone and Asha, the X is, at its core, an Android device. Thus, it supports most Android apps, but the means of obtaining those apps are not as cut and dry as they should be. The Nokia Store is the official place to go, but it doesn't offer the same library as the Play Store. Instead, Nokia curates apps: It invites developers to add lines of code that make their apps compatible with Nokia's special UI, and then submit their apps and wait for its approval. It's quite the process, and judging by the limited number of available apps in the Store, it seems that a lot of developers haven't bothered with it yet.

The Qualcomm Adreno 203 is one of the weaker GPUs on the market. Demanding games are therefore out of the question. Since the Nokia App Store does not offer any such games, this is not really a drawback and all available games run without any issues. Current 3D games or highly rated games are nowhere to be found, but classic games like Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja are available for download. The position sensor and the good touchscreen work very well and do their part to make the gaming experience an enjoyable one.Sim City Deluxe Fruit Ninja

Simply put, Nokia finally realised it could not afford to allow Android to displace it in the value segment, and that no one was interested in supporting yet another new OS. So it finally turned to Android - or as we now know, its underlying Linux foundation.

The X range comes in a lovely range of colours with the basic X is available in black, white, cyan, yellow, bright red and the bright green, which is especially striking. The slightly higher spec X+ shares the same palette while the larger XL swaps the red for an even nicer orange colour.

Summary For its price, the X has respectable features and good hardware. However, its confusing ecosystem and numerous performance issues make it hard to recommend over similarly priced budget phones.

VerdictReviewed: Nokia XThe Nokia X is a smartphone with a bright and evenly lit display and high build quality. Its main drawbacks are without a question the low performance and the low number of available applications. Why the manufacturer does not allow access to the Google Play Store will probably remain a mystery to potential buyers. Novice users, which are the target group for this phone, will have to find workarounds to get some apps installed, if they can be installed at all. Users who are not familiar with smartphones cannot be expected to manually install APKs to get familiar apps like WhatsApp or Instagram. The Nokia X Software Platform is also a bit sluggish at times, which can lead to stuttering. More demanding applications like benchmarks frequently crash. For that reason, we have decreased the final score (-4), although the full-featured offline navigation and the streaming-app Nokia MixRadio (+2), which is available free of charge, lessen the impact of the negative score. The user interface is well thought out as well as neat and easy to operate. Microsoft Mobile's effort is a good one overall, although some improvements are definitely necessary. The Nokia X handles most daily duties without issues; the voice quality is quite good as well when compared to competing smartphones. Users in the market for a smartphone that is simple to use and does not cost an arm and a leg should take a look at the Nokia X - provided they can live with the limited number of applications.

Rumors of Nokia making an Android smartphone had been churning for a long time. Finally, at Mobile World Congress in March, the Finnish company unveiled a new range of phones, the X, X+ and XL , aimed at those who can't afford hundreds of dollars or pounds on a new mobile.

What about speed? Well, there’s a noticeable lag no matter what you do with the phone but it’s tolerable to an extent. Simply browsing through the store or Fastlane is manageable but the lag acts as constant reminder that this is strictly a budget phone and you can only use that many apps comfortably, even though most of them will install. The Nokia X accepts APKs naturally and the Nokia Store has most of the popular apps from the Play Store that are guaranteed to work on the X. In case you don’t find it here, you can always refer to the One Mobile market app (pre-installed) however, there’s no guarantee it will work the way it’s supposed to.

Just like on Nokia's latest Lumia devices, the X features a Glance screen that lets you view the date, time and symbols for each type of notification awaiting you. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. Additionally, you can double-tap on the screen to wake it, but I couldn't get this to work very consistently. Unlike most Android devices, which offer reasonable multitasking options, the X is much more restrictive. You can only get to the Fastlane from the home screen, which means you can't multitask without exiting your current app completely.

Nokia's other notable app is Mix Radio, a fantastically underrated ad-free streaming service that you can customise based on your tastes. It works by asking you to pick a pre-made mix or create on by entering three artistes. If you create your own, you'll hear tracks by those three as well as other similar artistes which the app thinks you'll like. You can skip up to six tracks in each mix per hour, and upvote or downvote tracks to help it learn what you like. In our brief testing, we couldn't find an artiste too obscure for Mix Radio, across genres including classical, folk, and even Brit punk. The search function auto-suggests Indian artistes first, and a wide range of languages and regions are represented.

Video is recorded at a puny 352x288 resolution, which to us, makes it rather pointless. Quality wasn't that great, so we'd only use the Nokia X for video if there was nothing else available.

We ran a subset of our usual benchmarks, mostly due to the low-end specifications of the Nokia X. SunSpider and Mozilla Kraken, our browser-based tests, took 2733.8ms and 29863.9ms respectively to run, which is up to four times as long as a top-end Android phone and twice as long as models that sell in the mid-range today. Quadrant and AnTuTu gave us scores of 2,686 and 7,577 respectively, which were consistent with our low expectations, and are just about okay for a phone priced at this level. Neither 3DMark nor GFXbench, our primary graphics tests, was able to run on the Nokia X.

The X doesn't stray from Nokia's signature design language. In fact, if I were to briefly see it in the wild (not knowing what it was), I'd easily confuse it for an Asha 500-series device. Just like the Ashas, the X has square corners, straight edges, a large bezel and a removable plastic back cover with a matte finish, although it lacks the transparent casing of the Ashas. My review unit is a white, dual-SIM Nokia X, but it also comes in black, blue, yellow, red and green.