Nokia X Review

Design

One of the few areas where the Nokia X isn’t truly awful is design. There’s nothing overly inspiring about what Nokia has put together here, but it does get the job done in a way that’s reasonably ergonomic and visually decent.

Click on any photo to enlarge

The materials used on the X’s body have been borrowed from Nokia’s other smartphones. Except for the display, which is covered and surrounded by glass, the body uses a matte polycarbonate that’s somewhat soft to touch, but still feels solid and dependable. The polycarbonate shell wraps around the sides of the device in what could be described as a unibody, although the entire back portion can be removed to reveal several slots and the removable battery. The power button is in a comfortable location and has a decent clicky feel.

Like many low-range handsets, the Nokia X is dual-SIM ready, allowing you to use as both a personal and business phone with ease. Strangely, only one SIM slot is capable of using 3G networks, with the second only being able to access the very slow and outdated 2G infrastructure.
The Nokia X sports a small footprint, thanks to its 4-inch display, but it’s undeniably thick at 10.6mm. Typically designers will try and hide thickness through clever curves, but this didn’t happen with the X, resulting in a phone that’s undeniably blocky.



Around the device you’ll find typical features, such as the 3.5mm headphone jack on the top, a microUSB port on the bottom, a thin speaker above the display, and a small rear speaker in the bottom right corner. Nokia branding is minimal, but you’ll still find it on the front and back.
In what’s a first for Android devices, the Nokia X comes with just one capacitive navigation button, which has a back arrow printed on it. This is very unnatural (and annoying to use) as its acts primarily as a back button, but is also used for accessing the homescreen through a long press. Navigation becomes fiddly when there’s a single button, and you lose the ability to quickly search or switch apps.

Evidently the choice to include just one button provides no advantage over a multiple-button setup, even with Nokia’s custom software; in fact having multiple buttons would give a much better experience. Alas, this isn’t the only poorly thought out aspect of the smartphone.

Display

The Nokia X’s display is a 4.0-inch IPS TFT LCD with a resolution of 800 x 480 (WVGA, 233 PPI). If I had to take a guess, I’d say this display is identical to the one found in Nokia’s budget Windows Phones, the Lumia 520 and Lumia 525.

Despite making use of IPS technology, this isn’t in the same league as the IPS panels found in high-end smartphones such as the HTC One M8. Color quality and saturation is pretty decent for a low-end handset, but there’s noticeable backlight bleed when displaying blacks and dark colors that reduces contrast.
The resolution of the panel is acceptable – at a price point approaching $100 I don’t expect Retina-like quality – although there are upgrades to be had. The Moto E, for example, is in the same price bracket as the Nokia X but comes with a 960 x 540 display, which provides that extra level of clarity. Images and text on the X’s WVGA display look fine, but it’s not going to blow you away by any means.

One of the main issues I have with the Nokia X’s display is the amount of layers between the outer glass and the display module. Having these layers increases reflectivity, making it hard to view the display when there’s strong backlighting, even when it’s operating at maximum brightness. Viewing angles aren’t great either, especially at low brightness levels.
Unlike the Lumia 520, there’s no option to change the color tone or saturation of the display, and there’s no option to increase touchscreen sensitivity, meaning you can’t use the panel with gloves on. However, you can double tap the screen to wake the device, and there’s a “glance screen” feature that displays the time when the screen is 'off'.

Interestingly the capacitive touchscreen is only capable of registering two fingers at once, while most other smartphones of this era are capable of registering at least five. This doesn’t impact everyday use for actions such as pinch-to-zoom and scrolling, but it could become an issue if you’re playing games that have complex controls.
Sometimes the touchscreen appears to be briefly unresponsive, although I’m not sure if it’s related to the touchscreen itself, or the mediocre performance which I’ll discuss on the next page. Either way, the Nokia X doesn’t always respond as expected.

Performance

Internally the Nokia X is packing a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Play MSM8225 SoC, which is a 45nm part with a 1.0 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A5 CPU and an Adreno 203 GPU. The device comes with just 512 MB of RAM (or 768 MB in the Nokia X+), 4 GB of internal storage, plus HSPA, single-band Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0 radios.
Putting it bluntly, the hardware in this handset is outdated. The MSM8225 is the lowest-end chip from Qualcomm’s previous generation, superseded by the Snapdragon 200 towards the end of last year. This means the Nokia X, a new device released in 2014, comes with a two-year-old SoC, which is unacceptable for a class of smartphone that needs all the power it can get.

If Nokia could have improved just one area of the X, it would be the horrendous performance.

Even worse is the fact that the MSM8225 is a step lower than the MSM8227 that we saw in Nokia’s highly-popular Lumia 520 from early last year. At the very least, the hardware of the Nokia X should be on par with a year-old entry-level Windows Phone. But it’s not.

One of the only good aspects of the Nokia X’s hardware is the inclusion of a microSD card slot for expanding on the minimal 4 GB of internal NAND provided. With just 1.3 GB of storage available to the user out of the box, I’d highly recommend purchasing a microSD card, because that storage will quickly get filled by apps and photos.
Networking also lets the device down by only supporting HSDPA at 7.2 Mbps, which is well below the maximum speeds supported by most HSPA/3G networks. For a handset without LTE, ideally I would have liked to see download speeds of at least 14 or even 21 Mbps, so it could match the Lumia 520.
Performance around the operating system is truly terrible. Now I’m not expecting the Nokia X to perform at the same level as the Galaxy S5 or Xperia Z2, but I do expect it to give a similar experience to products of the same price point. And in this respect, it fails miserably at performing to an acceptable level.
Swiping, scrolling, zooming, and unlocking all come with a degree of lag. The Nokia X’s weak MSM8225 SoC and 512 MB of RAM is simply not powerful enough to render the operating system’s interface at a smooth 60 frames per second, or even 30 FPS on occasion. Either that, or Nokia hasn’t put in any effort to optimize the customized version of Android to run appropriately on this hardware.
A few weeks ago at Computex 2014 I had a brief hands-on time with Asus’ entry-level handset, the ZenFone 4, which is on sale in the same markets as the Nokia X for a slightly lower price. Unlike the Nokia X, performance from the Intel Atom SoC in the ZenFone was perfectly fine, and the Android skin was responsive and smooth to use for the most part. It’s a similar situation with Nokia’s own fantastic Lumia 520, which delivers great performance at a comparable price point to the X.

The lack of power is most noticeable while opening apps and trying to navigate through different screens within apps. There’s a pronounced delay each time you attempt to perform an action like opening the settings screen or loading an app, which is frustrating because often I thought my taps weren’t being registered by the touchscreen. Maybe they weren’t, but I suspect it’s got more to do with the lack of CPU power in this handset.
Web browsing is something I tried to avoid doing on the Nokia X because it’s often unbearably laggy. Loading up the mobile-optimized TechSpot homepage on the X sends the SoC into meltdown as it tries to render the entire page. You can forget scrolling and zooming, because there’s so much checkerboarding and pixelation that you can’t read the page for several seconds after you scroll down a bit.
The good news is some apps, like Twitter, aren’t a complete pain to use because they don’t require all that much CPU power. Surprisingly, some games like Fruit Ninja (which is included on the Nokia X) perform to an acceptable level, but there’s no hope at getting the more intense 3D games running at a playable frame rate.
Moving on to benchmarks and I’ll be honest, I’m not expecting anything great. In fact my expectations hit rock bottom when both Peacekeeper and Google Octane failed to complete a run in the stock Nokia Browser without crashing.



In Kraken, which I managed to run in the Nokia Browser successfully, the Nokia X performed pretty poorly up against other Android devices, although the browser is more optimized than Internet Explorer on the Lumia 520. I’ve also added in results from Vellamo 3.0, although I don’t have any entry-level device results to compare it to.


The Adreno 203 is showing its age, as you can see from the benchmarks above. It should be capable enough for 2D and low-intensity 3D games though.


Once again, the Nokia X performs poorly in NAND benchmarks.

Software, Camera

The Nokia X is running a forked AOSP version of Android 4.1, complete with a custom Nokia skin and enhancements that make this device very different to use than regular Android handsets.
The homescreen layout is very reminiscent of Windows Phone. Nokia has removed standard widgets and the app drawer in favor of a single homescreen which has all of your apps inside square tiles. Like with Windows Phone you can resize these tiles, and there’s also the ability to change the color of the tiles. You can also add in a selection of custom square widgets which act in a similar way to tiles, like a gallery widget or a clock.

One of Nokia’s marquee features for the X is Fastlane, a feature which can be accessed by swiping left-to-right on the homescreen. Fastlane is a combination of the Android notification pane and the recent apps window, showing everything in a chronological stream. It’s an interesting take on both aspects of Android that can be useful, and is probably my favorite aspect of the Nokia X software stack.
Replacing the notification pane when you swipe down from the top of the display is a selection of quick toggles for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, sound and mobile data. If you’ve used Android before, it can take a while to adjust from accessing notifications in this pull down menu to using the Fastlane, but I do like what Nokia has done.

My only gripe with the Fastlane would be that you can’t access notifications from inside apps any more, instead you have to head back to the homescreen and then swipe to access the Fastlane. That said, notifications are displayed on the lockscreen, which makes it easy to see what’s been going on from the moment you turn the display on.
The whole point of Nokia forking Android is to remove Google Mobile Services (GMS) and replace it with Microsoft’s counterparts. There’s no Google Maps on the handset, instead there’s Here Maps. No Gmail, instead there’s a standard email setup. No Google Play Store, replaced by Nokia Apps. And most strangely, no option to sync Google contacts and calendars.

Google and Microsoft haven’t been the best of friends on the mobile front, but on Android and Windows Phone, it’s possible to sync Microsoft and Google accounts respectively. On the Nokia X though, it’s the Microsoft way or nothing. So for someone like me, who uses Google for contact and calendar syncing, not having this feature in a smartphone is a deal-breaker.
Nokia Apps, the store for installing other applications, is another disappointing aspect of the Nokia X. While the store does have many basic apps, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Skype and several others, it lacks the full selection of apps compatible with Android, which you’d get if the Nokia X had the Google Play Store (and GMS).

It seems like Nokia even admits that the selection of apps is poor, because right on the home screen of Nokia Apps is section called “Other App Stores”, which allows you to download other stores like SlideME and 1mobile. Obviously these stores have a much greater selection, but it still doesn’t match the Play Store, and several apps in the store are incompatible with the Nokia X because they require critical GMS components.
The standard applications found on the Nokia X, like People, Messaging, Internet, Music and Gallery, aren’t anything to get excited about, but they get the job done. In most respects the apps are simple re-skins of the AOSP, and contain feature sets you’d expect for an entry-level smartphone.

Finally, the Nokia X’s keyboard is perfectly acceptable, and comes with a Swype-like feature for ease of use. Occasionally the keyboard can be laggy to use in a standard typing fashion, although this can be put down to the X’s atrocious performance rather than an issue with the implementation of the keyboard itself.

Camera

Another area of the Nokia X that’s hugely disappointing is the camera. Nokia chose to use what could possibly be the worst smartphone camera I’ve used in years, even on low-end devices, that in many conditions is too horrible to use.
The camera sensor is a very mediocre 3.15-megapixel Samsung S5K5CA 1/5” CMOS with 1.4µm pixels, paired with an f/2.8 lens, and without autofocus or an LED flash. That’s right, this handset’s camera doesn’t have autofocus! A critical camera feature that has been included in practically every smartphone, high-end or low-end, since the dawn of Android in 2007. Insanity!


The fixed focus camera lens means that if you’re attempting to photograph a subject closer than half a meter or so, it’ll be out of focus. You can forget photographing food, or anything macro, because the lack of autofocus is too restrictive.
The 1/5” CMOS sensor is quite terrible in terms of the quality it delivers. Taking a look at full resolution images reveals a high level of artefacts and post-processing quality reduction, which causes a loss of detail in the edges of objects. Downscaling the images to 1080p still shows these artefacts, making it hard to get a good looking image from the Nokia X, even in the best of conditions.

Even if the sensor had a greater level of detail, white balance and color saturation would let it down. Images taken with the Nokia X look bland and uninteresting, despite the scene captured often being bright and sunny.
In poor conditions, the Nokia X really struggles. The f/2.8 lens combined with a poor sensor, despite the 1.4 micron pixels, makes shooting in low light conditions a complete pain. Images taken indoors are often blurry, very grainy and – in the poorest of conditions – so dark you can’t actually see what’s going on.

All of these issues are compounded by a camera preview that is displayed at under 20 frames per second. In strong lighting you get a reasonably responsive preview, but moving indoors or into a poorly lit area and the camera preview becomes a blurry mess. How you’re supposed to see what you’re taking a photo of is beyond me.
Capping it all off is 480p video recording at 30 frames per second. Quality from these videos is just as good as you’d expect from the stills: mediocre at best.

Battery Life, Final Thoughts

The Nokia X comes packing a 1,500 mAh, 5.55 Wh removable battery, usually adequate for day-to-day usage of the Nokia X. Due to the generation-old SoC and general low level of performance, the SoC will often have to work quite hard to complete tasks, consuming more power than if it was using a newer, faster chip.
Unlike some low-end handsets with imposibly long battery life, the Nokia X will need a charge every night so you don’t run out of juice the following day. Most days I ended with ~20-30% of the battery’s charge remaining. Obviously using the camera for longer periods, or making lengthy phone calls, will reduce this estimate.

When gaming, you’ll be lucky to get three hours out of the Nokia X, as the 45nm SoC chews through 5.55 Wh pretty quickly. However the performance from the Nokia X isn’t great, so I doubt you’ll be wanting to game for very long.
The results from my usual video playback battery life test are quite interesting. On every other phone tested, the SoC was equipped with a dedicated video decoding/encoding block that’s capable of 720p decoding. Apparently the Nokia X’s MSM8225 doesn’t have that luxury, so for my playback test it had to decode on the CPU, significantly reducing battery life.

Still, the above test is a good depiction of how long the X lasts while decoding HD content. Below I’ve also included charge times for the device from a flat battery. I saw no difference in charging time switching from a 10W to a 7.5W charger, indicating the extra power input makes no difference as the power management chip throttles the higher amperage.

Browsing time on Wi-Fi was also quite poor, as you can see from results below.

Final Thoughts

The Nokia X is, quite frankly, the worst smartphone I’ve ever reviewed.
There are literally no redeeming qualities to Nokia’s first attempt at producing an Android handset, especially at its ludicrous price point that makes it more expensive to purchase than the year-old – and significantly better – Nokia Lumia 520.
The performance of the Nokia X is horrendous. The device is laggy from the moment you turn it on, often to the point where a lack of responsiveness becomes frustrating. It’s also the first device I’ve reviewed to crash while performing an in-browser benchmark, as the SoC simply choked to death.

Equally terrible is the camera: a 3 megapixel fixed-focus shooter is unacceptable for this class of device in 2014. Almost every photo I took with the Nokia X was bad, price point notwithstanding.
Fastlane may be an interesting addition to Android, but the lack of apps in the Nokia App store, poor optimization and missing Google integration makes Nokia’s choice of forking Android a mistake. Honestly, Windows Phone is much better suited to an entry-level product like this, as it would deliver a smoother and more consistent experience.
Other aspects of the Nokia X, including the design, battery life and display, are nothing to write home about in a market crowded with entry-level options.

Arguably the worst aspect of the Nokia X is the price. For around $130 there are many better options. The Lumia 520, which I’ve mentioned countless times, is not only cheaper than the $130 Nokia X, but it’s a far better product from the very same company.
If you’re looking for something Android-powered I’d steer towards the $130 Motorola Moto E, or the Asus Zenfone 4 that’s available for under $100.

At time of posting this review, there's a rumor that Microsoft is set to launch the "Nokia X2" as soon as this week. This would be a direct successor to the Nokia X reviewed here a mere 4 months after launch. Needless to be said, proceed with caution.