INTRO
So some times ago my trusty old Sony Xperia E4 decided it’s tired and old and don’t want to work anymore. So now the phone speaker and both cameras aren’t working. Also sometimes the phone itself just dies out of nowhere. So I was in urgent need of a new phone.
Thanks to the forum I have reached the conclusion I can’t quite afford a decent Xperia phone and have to go with something else. That something else turned out to be Nokia 3.1.
Since both my cameras of my old phone aren’t working I can’t show any “real” pictures of the phone.
Dry stats:
| Dimensions | 146.3 x 68.7 x 8.7 mm (5.76 x 2.70 x 0.34 in) |
|---|---|
| Weight | 138.3 g (4.87 oz) |
| Display | 5.2 inches, 69.8 cm2 (~69.4% screen-to-body ratio) |
| IPS 720 x 1440 pixels, 18:9 ratio (~310 ppi density) | |
| OS | Android 8.0 (Oreo); Android One |
| Chipset | Mediatek MT6750 (28 nm) |
| CPU | Octa-core (4x1.5 GHz Cortex-A53 & 4x1.0 GHz Cortex-A53) |
| GPU | Mali-T860MP2 |
| Card slot | microSD, up to 256 GB |
| Internal memory | 16 GB, 2 GB RAM |
| Camera | 13mp back, 8mp front |
| Battery | Non-removable Li-Ion 2990 mAh battery |
First impressions:
So I got the phone. They gave me a choice between white body and the one I got - the dark blue body with copper accenting. I looks quite good. It’s aluminum, so it feels nice in the hand.
It’s taller and narrower than the Xperia I had before that…
I started touching it and surprise surprise, it’s much faster and snappier than the good old Sony. Apps that struggled before don’t struggle anymore. It’s lightning fast and I love that.
Software:
The phone came clean as a tear drop.
That’s all there is - chrome, google play, youtube, maps, gmail… Basic google apps you expect. No unneeded software.
No settings done what so ever. Everything is open and is waiting for you to tell it what to do. In my case - waiting for me to tell it what to do and frustrate me with 50 notiffications a nanosecond.
Box and accessories:
Basic. Very basic.
Positives:
- It looks good, it feels good to use. The screen is nicely bright, so it is fine using it outside.
- It’s really fast, especially compared to my old phone.
- And the battery. Oh, the battery. If I save it a bit I can go 2 days with 1 charging. If I push it - day max. But I try to save it cause I don’t want to constantly keep it on the charger.
- The camera is weird. It shifts the colors. Noticeably shifts the colors. The food I usually take pictures of for the forum looks different in my plate. The old Sony shifted colors as well, but still the pictures looked somehow similar. It’s much cleaner image wise, but the color shifting is weird.
- The Android is clean and virgin, waiting for the user to pop it’s cherry. And honestly that’s kinda issue I have with it. There is absolutely no software on it, other than the absolute bare minimum.
Negatives:
- There is nothing on the phone. No music player, no screenshot tool, no anything. People call that bloatwear or whatever, but TBH I kinda miss it. Sony put on some basic software I actually used.
- No settings were done what so ever. Everything possible that needs setting up was thrown at me in the first 20 minutes. I don’t even know how I set up some stuff. I just told it not to bother me anymore. Sony put up some work to do the tedious basic set up so I can just use the thing.
- Something I have noticed - you know phones adjust their screen brightness according to surrounding light? Yeah, all fine, but this one does it weirdly. It darkens the screen momentarily, so when I’m swiping and my hand covers the sensor, the screen darkens, and it takes it couple seconds to increase the brightness, so I have about 2 seconds time where I can’t really see much of the screen. It’s weird.
- The sound… Oh god the sound… The music sounds so awful. I’m using the same files form the same SDcard and using the same headphones, and the sound is atrocious. Not to mention the stock headset that comes with the phone - pure garbage. Such garbage. Setting up stuff is only an issue once. The sound I am stuck with. The sony headset that came with the Xperia was so much better than my current headphones and my current headphones are so much better than the Nokia headphones. It hurts my ears to listen to music on the Nokia, knowing how it sounded on the Xperia with the Sony headphones.
Final words:
So basically things are simple:
If you want clean android and don’t plan to listen to music on the phone - it’s lightning fast and very nice to use. But I listen to music almost constantly and I am so sad. I’m sorry, Nokia, but for my next phone I will try and get Sony again.
