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

Battery & System Performance

Nokia 3 Subway Surfer

Nokia 3 – System Performance

Nokia 3 is the most low-profile Android smartphone among two others – Nokia 5 and Nokia 6, launched earlier this year by HMD Global Oy. This budget or low-end phone is powered by an year old MediaTek system-on-chip MT6737. The chip carries a 64bit quad-core processor clocked at 1.25 GHz along side a GPU Mali-T720 MP2.

Frankly, this chip is really for lower end devices and performs just below the mark. Some manufacturers quickly adapted an improved version of the chip MT6737T – T for Turbo usually, which is just a boost of clock speed on both the CPU and the GPU. Example is the recently launched Huawei Y5 2017. The difference is like double the benchmark scores.

But, a regular user hardly will use to run these benchmark apps on your phone from time to time. They will concern about the device how does it perform practically in their day to day use. How much extensively they can use a phone in comfortable way. If these are the questions in your mind, then sure Nokia 3 is good to go in your hands most of the times.

Tried the games such as NFS No Limit and Subway Surfer on this piece of hardware, they actually worked fine mostly but a very rare lag or freezing moment were faced – not frequently though. That’s not something you won’t expect from a low-end phone such as this one. However if you keep things smooth and not put some harsh burden on this little thing, it will go along with you easy. In fact, the phone won’t go hot while playing game for a few minutes. But the camera usage, specially when outdoors, may warm your hands quite well which indeed is uncomfortable.

Nokia 3 Need for Speed No Limit

The truth is, this phone is not for gamers. So if you are one, just stay away from it.

Burden means, you wouldn’t to overload this phone if you want some smooth experience. This phone gives quite a nice and smooth experience when you set it up initially. Sure the social apps such as Facebook, WhatsApp or even Twitter would be ones of the first installs for many out there. The more you go installing this and that app, you will lose the storage as well as, if the apps stay there on the background, you will start feeling delays in opening or resuming the apps. So you’d better keep control of the apps and games on Nokia 3 if you want some good experience.

It will mostly fail on you, just like any other device with low storage space. Right now, with only two games installed – NFS No Limit (1GB) and Subway Surfer (111MB), I have to take care of auto download stuff in apps like WhatsApp (better to keep it turned off). Within a month this unit with me had normal use of camera and keep storing photos (without removing the crap out of it) is now giving me hard time with alerts to remove other stuff. While writing this factor here, I just removed around 1 GB of auto downloaded images/videos from the WhatsApp folders. So 16 GB storage in today’s age is something you need to keep under control. But it’s not a complaint about Nokia 3, if you got to get a lower-end smartphone in this price range, you will get more storage than this.

Nokia 3 Hands-On

Battery Performance

Nokia 3 is good at its battery power. It manages to give you over 24 hours easily with extensive usage of throughout the day – exclude the extensive gaming though. By extensive usage you can consider regular usage of the phone as primary device with both SIM cards active – one on 4G/LTE. Switching from LTE data to WiFi all day (assume 50/50). Browsing, examining apps, playing games, shooting photos and recording videos, installing/uninstalling apps to make room for other stuff etc. etc.

With some very basic usage that include only calling, texting, some browsing and some social interaction, specially when you are home and stays connected on your home network over WiFi, this phone can give you over 36 hours.

On the other hand if you go little aggressive with it and shutdown your other work to keep using the phone, playing games, watching videos online or offline, add some GPS navigation as well and anything like that. Do not expect Nokia 3 to give you more than 12 hours. The worst thing is that it’s gonna take hours to take full charge.