Nokia 2

The cheap priced Nokia 2 is a rung higher than its predecessor and promises to provide an upgraded experience to its users. At a price of Rs 6,179, Nokia 2 is a durable handset for the people looking to upgrade from their feature phones.

Nokia 2 is a moderate upgrade of Nokia 1, addressing some of its issues. Though it does not come with a significant boost in performance, it has arrived with adequate stamina to back you up through your daily use. Lack of fast charging is a serious downside though. It is a better recommendation than Nokia 1 for people trying to get their first smartphone and looking for more juice in their handset.

Nokia 2 looks similar to the previous Lumia handsets. It is curved giving it a feel-good effect, and while the whole phone is plastic, the sides are anodised aluminium. You can remove the plastic back, and manually replace the battery, a reminiscent of the past, in the current days of non-removable batteries. Despite having a large battery than the Nokia 1, it is lightweight at 161g, however, a bit chunky at 9.3mm of thickness. While not equipped with the latest version of Gorilla Glass, it does come with Gorilla Glass 3 which can ward off scratches if the phone is handled well. Nokia 2 does not come with water resistance.

One of its best features is the screen. It has a 5-inch HD display with a resolution of 720p. The low 720p is sharp enough to produce pixels in small fonts. However, flagship competitors like Moto G5 and Huawei P10 Lite have already gone past this display and progressed to 1080p screens. Nokia 2 has a remarkably good colour and contrast giving it a rich appearance. It has auto-brightness which works fine. While there is no colour customisation option, the default setting is quite fine.

Nokia 2 is powered by Snapdragon 212 chipset clocked at 1.3 GHz, partnered with a 1GB RAM. It is a mediocre chipset with only four cores of Cortex-A7 type, a chipset that was passable back in 2013. Nowadays, most flagship phones have moved forward to octa-core processors. Despite the lack of RAM, some high-end games can run properly on this phone. Real Racing 3 can run fine, but it can experience some lagging and frame rate drops, though it won’t spoil your gaming experience. Benchmark scores put Nokia 2 at 980 points which is quite low considering Moto G5 which gets about 2,377 points – blazing past Nokia 2’s performance. Web page surfing may be slow and too many apps will result in a slowdown or freeze the phone.

The cameras of Nokia 2 are very basic and produces a worse image quality than the flagship competitor Moto G5. The rear 8MP camera is attached with an unusually small f/2.7 aperture. Larger apertures could be found in similarly priced and cheaper phones. It results in the lack of proper light intake resulting in poor sharpness and a sizeable amount of purple fringing in the spots where there had been an intense light contrast. It has a poor edge sharpness. Details and dynamic range is also not up to the mark.

At night, the phone has an extremely slow shutter speed, and this can result in blurry images if the hands are not kept entirely steady. Night image processing still does a good job at maintaining colour and, but the processing is extremely slow.

In the front, it has a basic 5MP sensor. Selfies are okay and could be used as profile pictures under good lighting, but it does not capture plenty of details. Shutter lag is also an issue. Nokia 2 cameras are one of its weakest features, and while it could be considered as per the low range, the slow shutter speed is not acceptable quality.

Nokia 2 has a large 4,100mAh which is one of its features that stand out.  A 90-minute video played at maximum brightness makes it lose only 15% off the battery. A full charge may not last for a whole day, but it will chug on for about 10 hours, which is a fantastic capacity for this device. Moto G5 fails to beat it with its 2,800 mAh losing about 22% of its charge in the same video test. However, Nokia 2 does not come with fast charging, so charging it overnight is a fair suggestion

Nokia 2 is a phone for people who want to get a cheap handset. It is an excellent entry-level phone for those who have not dealt with smartphones before, but there are better alternatives. Performance of Nokia 2 is disappointing and coupled with a lousy camera and dated display, it is a difficult recommendation to make, even for its low range. Moto G5 amps up all these and comes out as a better performer.