A few years back, Nokia used to be the house hold name, but in its absence, many smartphone makers climbed up the ladder to what they are now. After going through a lot, Finnish-based handset maker Nokia made its come back in the smartphone industry, in-ties with HMD global. Aiming at the mid-range market, Nokia 6 was launched in the Indian market at a price tag of priced at Rs. 14,999.
While the build quality and reliability of those phones back then were hard to match, does this new Nokia 6 lives up to the old-Nokia phones? Let’s find it out.
Unboxing
We unboxed the smartphone recently, check out the video.
Box Contents
- Nokia 6 smartphone in Black color
- 2-pin charger (5V-2A)
- Micro USB Cable
- Nokia Headset WH-108
- SIM ejector tool
- Quick start guide
Display, Design, and Hardware
Starting off with the display, the Nokia 6 sports a 5.5-inch (1920 x 1080 pixels) 2.5D curved glass display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. The display is pretty impressive for a mid-range and it is bright, vibrant with good color reproduction. The viewing angles are good, so do the sunlight legibility.
Talking about the design, the phone is minimalistic in design yet refreshing. It has a sharp flat corner, that might leave an impression on your skin. It’s worth mentioning that the build quality and finish is top-notch. If you are ardent Nokia fan, you can see their touch on their design too. In terms of build, Nokia 6 has a blend of class, quality and almost matches the old Nokia phones too.
The Nokia 6 comes with a unibody metal design and has a smooth finish on the back. It measures 154 x 75.8 x 7.8 mm and weighs around 169g, which is bit heavy.
Talking about the placements, there is a usual set of proximity and ambient light sensors, earpiece, 8MP front facing the camera. It also has gyroscope and a magnetic sensor, otherwise known as a magnetometer for VR headsets. Just below the display, we have two capacitive buttons and a physical home button that also acts as a fingerprint scanner as well.
There is a 3.5mm audio jack on the top. It has dual speakers, one on the front, embedded into the earpiece and the other on the bottom. It also has dedicated TFA9891 amplifier that promises clear and loud sound with deep bass and also has Dolby Atmos. At the bottom, there is a primary microphone and micro USB port. On the right, there is a power button along with volume rockers.
The Hybrid dual SIM slot (nano + nano / microSD) is present on the left side. Turning back, we have a 16MP camera with dual-tone LED flash and a secondary microphone on top of that. However, the only drawback here is the lack of notification LED lights.
Performance
The Nokia 6 is powered by an Octa-Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 (4 x 1.2 GHz Cortex A53 + 4 x 1.5 GHz Cortex A53) 64-bit processor with Adreno 505 GPU and has 3GB of RAM. The smartphone is just meant for casual usage and not for intensive gaming.
In terms of performance, the Nokia 6 serves the purpose perfectly and flawlessly. However, when you push the device beyond its limits, it starts to hang, lag, and what not. Multitasking in this device is not effective as it will take good 4 to 5 seconds to open apps, if you have multiple apps running in the background. If you want to experience smooth performance, make sure you kill the apps running in the background. Check out some synthetic benchmark scores below.
Camera
The Nokia 6 sports a 16MP rear camera with dual-tone LED flash, PDAF, 1.0um sensor, f/2.0 aperture. The front side is taken care of 8MP front-facing camera, 1.12um sensor, f/2.0 aperture, 84˚ wide-angle lens. Under good daylight conditions, the pictures are good with natural color, and finer details. If you try to click a picture without any stabilization, just a little shake, your photo is gone. During low light, the photo is captured mostly with noise. The front camera is pretty decent for selfies and video calling.
Check out the camera samples (Click the image for full resolution samples).
Software and Connectivity
The Nokia runs on Android 7.1.1 Nougat with August 1, 2017, security patch. It runs on almost stock Android without any bloatware, which itself is a good reason to consider this device. From the lock screen, you can access Google assistant and camera app. It comes with a Pixel-like launcher ditching the app drawer button and replacing it with a swipe up gesture.
It comes with Google suite of apps, along with few apps including Amazon and Amazon Prime video. HMD has also promised an Android O update for the Nokia 6 and other Nokia phones in this series as well. Overall, you can just experience the smoothness, when you operate the device.
In terms of storage, the Nokia 6 has a 3GB LPDDR3 RAM and has a 32GB of internal memory, that can be expandable up to 128GB with microSD. Out of 3GB, the user generally will get around 1.1GB free when the default apps are running in the background, and out of 32GB, users get around 20GB approximately.
The Nokia 6 comes with stock dialer UI and Google keyboard. During calls, the earpiece volume is good and there is no call drop as well. Moreover, it also supports connectivity options including 4G VoLTE, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, USB OTG.
Fingerprint sensor
It has a fingerprint scanner as well-integrated into the home button. It is quick to unlock the device when placed your finger on it. You can add up to 5 fingerprints, similar to most other phones.
Battery
The Nokia 6 is juiced with 3000mAh built-in battery without any fast charging technology. With casual usage, it took us throughout the day without having to charge twice and for heavy users it will last for less than a day.
In our One Charge rating, the Nokia 6 managed to score 12 hours and 34 minutes, which is just average. Since it doesn’t have support for fast charging, it take solid 2 and half hours to charge the phone from 0 to 100%, but it takes 53 minutes to charge from 0 to 50%. Check out the complete set of battery life test results here.
Conclusion
Overall, Nokia 6 has a perfect mix of class, quality, fluidity to be one of the best in the mid-range smartphone segment. Even with few misses including notification light, slight lag on multitasking, and above average camera, Nokia 6 will give other Chinese handsets a good competition. If you want more performance at this price range, you can look out for Moto G5s Plus, Xiaomi Mi A1, Lenovo P2 and others.
The Nokia 6 comes in Matte Black, Silver, Tempered Blue and Copper colors, with a price tag of Rs. 14,999 and goes on flash sale every week exclusively on Amazon.in.
Pros
- Build quality
- Good display
- Good camera
Cons
- Lacks notification light
- Hybrid SIM slot
- Average battery life