Nokia X2 Review – Too Late

Nokia X2 and Semi-Android phones like these could have saved Nokia. I know these are big words. But you never know. If they have launched Android smartphones with their PureView camera technology. It surely would’ve been a big hit. I know that they hated the initial version of Android but to save itself even Apple shook hands with Microsoft at one point. To survive you’ve got to make hard decisions. That’s why i said too late. Anyway, lets get to the review now.

Build Quality

Nokia X2 is made of plastic front and back. Every corner. No surprises, looking at its price. It’s feels like a tank made of plastic. Very solid. One of the best build quality you could find in this price range. But that increases the overall thickness of the phone. It is 11 mm thick, could’ve easily been 10 or 9 mm thick without the thick cover. It also have some kind of protective glass in front not confirmed whether its Gorilla Glass. It doesn’t have notification LED.

Display

Nokia X2 comes with 4.3 inches IPS LCD display of WVGA resolution. The screen quality is decent best is the sunlight readability because of Nokia’s Clear Black technology. Its got decent viewing angles. Although they could’ve been better. Other than that there’s nothing to talk about the screen. It is what it is. Not very good, not very bad, just decent. For the price still better than TFT screens that comes in most Sony or Samsung phones.

Camera

Nokia X2’s camera doesn’t come with a lot of features or options. But it does comes with basic functions which are more than enough for every day photography. Specs wise its got 5MP primary camera and 0.3MP front camera. it does have auto-focus and touch to focus both although auto-focus is a little slow so you might want to use touch to focus other wise the photos will come out of focus. Its image quality is pretty decent in good lighting condition. But in bad lighting conditions, like the conditions itself image quality becomes bad. It picks up a lot of noise and does not pick up much light. Making the image look darker and off colour. Flash doesn’t help much either.

Video quality is decent you can zoom in video by sliding your finger up and zoom out by sliding your finger down while taking the video. You can not shoot photos and videos simultaneously. It shoots video up-to HD/720p resolution in MP4 format. Below are some still samples in various lighting conditions and video sample is in the review video below.

Multimedia

Nokia X2 comes with two music apps one is a normal default audio player, the other one is Nokia Mix Radio app which is a pretty app to listen to random mixes of soundtracks. The quality in earphones is good, loud and clear. Its external speaker is very good too. In fact it’s louder than most of the similar priced smartphones. It’s loud but not that clear though and also lacks any sort of depth or bass. Could hear a little distortion some times. It can play 1080p videos in its default video player although the playback could stutter sometimes.

OS/UI/Storage/RAM

Nokia X2 runs on Nokia Software Platform X version 2.0 which itself is based on Android Open Source Project. It is basically nothing but android with Windows Phone’s live tiles and without Google services like Play store. It has received a software update Version 2.1 as you can see in the screen shots below. Now you can put live wallpapers and wallpapers in background of home screen. It also comes with Fastlane which shows all your recent activities in one place. You can see more about that in the video below.

It comes with 1GB of RAM out of which you’ll get around 400MB free and 4GB of total internal storage out of which you’ll get around 2GB free. You can also install memory card up-to 32GB. This phone does support move to sd feature. In Nokia X2 it’s called move to memory card.

Benchmarks

I ran four benchmarks on Nokia X2 and it performed as any other entry level Android smartphone would. Or any other smartphone with Snapdragon 200 chipset would. Anyway, here are the scores and full device information.

Antutu

Vellamo

Nenamark 2

Quadrant

Performance

Previous Nokia X series phones came with dual core Cortex A5 processor which quite honestly is a very pathetic processor and even worse Adreno 203GPU. This new Nokia X2 though, comes with at least decent dual core Cortex A7 processor and Adreno 305 which is actually not that far behind from the current android phones. At least not in the GPU department. Moto E also comes with the same chipset. So the performance is decent of this phone and miles better than old Nokia X phones. If you liked the old Nokia X phones then you are going to love this one. It can play graphic intensive games like Asphalt 8 with medium graphic settings.

Communication

Nokia X2 is a dual sim device. Supports one micro SIM and one mini SIM. Voice quality is loud and clear from both the earpiece and mic. Its WiFi reception could have been better though. Even after being in the same room as the WiFi router it was still missing one or two bars of WiFi frequently. It also Bluetooth 4.0.

Whatsapp on Nokia X2

I have seen a lot of people asking this question for the old Nokia X series phones. It’s like Whatsapp is the first app they try to install after they buy the phone. Anyway, here’s the answer. Whatsapp is not available on the app store Nokia X2 comes with that does not mean you have to root your phone to get Whatsapp. All you have to do is to download and install it from any third party app store. In my case i installed it from ‘1 Mobile Market’ a pretty decent play store alternative. And that’s it.

Battery

Battery life of Nokia X2 is very good. I charged it a day before review at around evening time and downloaded Asphalt 8 and lots of other stuff during night in fact i left its WiFi on the whole night. In the morning the battery was at around 70%. For the record Nokia X2 contains 1800mAh battery. The next day(the review day) i used it in the morning, played games on it listened to music on it. And during the time of review the battery level was around 50% mark. As you can see in the review video below.

At the time of writing this review after running all the benchmarks and using it some more the battery still hasn’t died completely and it still has around 20% of battery left. So all i can say is you can get around a day of battery life from this phone on normal use. Which is good looking at the small size of the battery. And its processor isn’t that power hungry anyway.

Choice/Verdict

If you are a Nokia fan then this phone is like a no brainer. But if you want an android phone with a much bigger screen and much powerful specs, around the same price range. Then obviously this phone is not for you. In local shops this phone is selling for around Rs. 9,000(Approx $150) add 1,000 Rupees more and you can get an Asus Zenfone 5(Online only). And many more smartphones from companies like Karbonn, Micromax, Lava, Xiaomi, Motorola, Gionee.

But if you compare it with phones from Samsung and Sony only in the same price range. Then, you’ll find that this is the only phone which is a complete package. Remember, Nokia sells by name. This phone holds a tremendous resale value. Much more than any of the phone named above.