Nokia 3 Detailed Review – Everything you want to know before buying

Build, Design and Display

Nokia 3 White/Silver Back

Nokia 3 – Silver/White Retail Pakistan.

Nokia 3 – Build & Design

One thing about Nokia 3 is its first impressions which sure will blow your mind and make you expect more from inside. Being a budget or low-end Android smartphone, Nokia 3 really impresses with its great build quality in its class.

Even though “Designed by HMD Global Oy” labeled on the back of the phone, the design itself reminds me of the late Lumia designs with polycarbonate back panel with a slightly curved edges meeting into aluminium frame. The closest example is Lumia 925 with a little bit differences on corners and antenna stripes.

In hands, the phone seriously gives premium feel from all around. Perfectly fine in grip and on top the smooth Gorilla Glass with 2.5D curved edges. This white model didn’t have any handling issues, however the matte black finish of Nokia 3 is more comfortable.

Nokia 3 Hands-on

Nokia 3 – Single handed use

Nokia 3’s frame is fully rounded from back to front where it meets directly into the front glass. There’s no thin middle plastic layer between the aluminium frame and the front glass or back panel just like its premium offerings a couple of years ago.

That’s where other brands will lose the point at this price range as you will mostly find them having a thin plastic layer between the screen and the metal frame or even no metal frame at all.

Nokia 3 Build Metal Glass

Nokia 3 – 2.5D curved glass meets directly at the aluminium frame

But in this price range, the HMD could have let the rear panel removable.

Controls and Components

Nokia 3 comes with all common components and controls on board including the 3.5mm audio jack (on top) and a micro USB port along side the a loud speaker (on the bottom of the phone). Primary mic or mouthpiece is located at the bottom besides the micro USB port and a secondary mic – for noise cancellation or stereo audio recording, is located on top besides the audio jack.

The antenna stripes are embedded into the metal frame on both the top and the bottom side of the phone. However there is no visible plastic element found on Nokia 3 otherwise.

Power button and the volume rocker are hosted on the right hand side of the phone to ease your thumb. While on the left side of the phone, there are the dedicated slots for both the dual-SIM cards and microSD card for storage expansion.

Provided SIM eject tool works on both, however the SIM slots are referred, as usually, by the SIM 1 and SIM 2 whereas only SIM 1 is 4G/LTE enabled. Once the cellular data is set on SIM2, you will be limited to use 3G or 2G.

On the rear panel, there’s only some branding labels on the lower half portion. On the upper portion, a little module is positioned in vertical with a primary camera and an LED flash.

We’ll talk about camera features afterwards in a separate section. For now continue with the components on the front side.

The upper front portion hosts the very common components on the phone including the basic earpiece along side the proximity and light sensor as well as the front-facing camera. The “Nokia” branding on the upper right corner also follows the similar presentation from the late Lumia smartphones.

On the other hand the standard capacitive navigation keys – the back, home and recent apps key are the lower portion below the display. Unimpressive that they are not back-lit. HMD could have chosen on-screen navigation keys which could be more useful in dark. Don’t know about others but I feel little bit limited when the navigation keys are present but not visible.

Display

Nokia 3 has 5-inch screen with IPS display and serves at the HD resolution of 1280×720 pixels. The display is laminated and polarized for fingerprint resistance and reduced reflections when viewing outdoors. It gives better viewing angles than the lot other in its price range.

Nokia 3 Display

As per our test, Nokia 3 actually stands at what it promises about when we talk about its display. With the Gorilla Glass on top, it reminds about that smooth experience on its latest flagship phones. Android’s adaptive brightness keeps things in control for better viewing in a certain ambient conditions.

Bright Display

But when we compared it with the Huawei’s Y5 2017, both were equally vibrant in colors whereas the Y5 had some warmth while the Nokia 3’s were more natural.

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Reduced Reflections

Most importantly, the key thing to tell is the viewing angles. Nokia 3 performs really well in all viewing angles. Impressively, this low-end Nokia phone is far better with its reduced reflections and high-contrast when compared to Huawei Y5.

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In sum up, the display of Nokia 3 is quite bright with vibrant colors. With laminated Gorilla Glass Nokia 3 provides a nice and smooth experience with well controlled fingerprint glares on the screen. Viewing angles are impressive with outdoor visibility and readability too great to be on this budget smartphone.

HD display with only 720p resolution could make you think that it’s not a good choice but comm’on you are looking at a budget phone. On a 5-inch display it makes the pixel density of about ~294ppi which is is not bad for your reading or visual experience.