Nokia 5 1 Plus Camera Setup

If you ask an enthusiast whether it is worth buying a Nokia, he will definitely dodge the direct answer and say “well, maybe you better take Xiaomi or Huawei?”. Even to Samsung, which everyone criticizes for the mercilessly worsened budget smartphones, technically advanced guys do not feel such aversion.

And why? Not because the specifications are so far behind competitors (this is just not bad), but because the new Nokia has a reputation of a manufacturer “without a soul”. Like, we somehow remember the original, completely Finnish Nokia, and nothing like Windows phones, but this is a Chinese remake. That’s how tech savvy people who have been saying for centuries that phones need to pay attention not to the image, but to the specifications, bypass Nokia only because it doesn’t add up a beautiful legend of the manufacturer.

Only in reality there are not so many nostalgic geeks, so the new Nokias are bought in large quantities around the world. not as much as the Chinese giant manufacturers are selling, but more than, for example, Sony, ASUS, Meizu or ZTE.

At the same time, with every new Nokia smartphone, dissatisfaction diverges on the Internet, saying, “before, there was nothing else, but now it’s a mediocre Chinese price. Today, we have on our test two Nokia’s latest for Russia and the best opportunity to check whether this is so.

Appearance and design

Someone’s design of the current Nokia smartphones is annoying, someone likes it, but they don’t look like seamless copies of the iPhone, unlike many competitors, and even with a new owner, they remain more or less high-quality and reasonable in characteristics.

But with the names, in the best traditions of Nokia, a complete mess. Not the same, however, as in the days of the four-digit Finnish mobile phones, when the Nokia 6233 was a sophisticated multimedia with stereo speakers, a color screen and a good camera, and the Nokia 6240. appeared 5 years earlier and, of course, was from a different era in terms of performance.

However, we have Nokia 5.1 Plus and Nokia 7.1 here. And, if Apple Samsung, Meizu or Sony Plus means a model with a large screen, Nokia is just a way to sew another, more expensive smartphone model into the Nokia 5 series (the standard Nokia 5.1 came out a bit earlier).

Nokia 5 1 Plus Camera Setup

Left. Nokia 7.1, right. Nokia 5.1 Plus

Nokia doesn’t save on cases even on younger models, so it’s hard to figure out who is the coolest one from 5.1 Plus and 7.1 until you turn on the screen and start using your smartphone “for all the money”. The boxes are the same, the charges are almost the same, and only the silver edging in 7.1 clearly distinguishes the older model from the younger.

From photographs that show the “chin” with the inscription Nokia, you can’t say so, but in fact smartphones are quite compact. Nokia 5.1 Plus, for example, offers 6.18 inches of screen where the iPhone 7 Plus can only accommodate 5.5 inches. And even Xiaomi Redmi Note 6 Pro, which has a screen with the same cutout, is larger and more massive.

Special thanks to the manufacturer for USB-C not only in the older model for 18 thousand rubles, but also in the youngest for 15 thousand. Indeed, in our time, only the Chinese are introducing new technologies faster than anyone.

From above. Nokia 7.1, below. Nokia 5.1 Plus

And by the same unpleasant Chinese tradition, the NFC module is only in the older model, Nokia 7.1. This, incidentally, is a typical story for Xiaomi and Meizu, who also believe that if the Chinese do not need NFC, nobody needs it. Only Huawei completes budget smartphones for Europe / Russia with support for NFC and, accordingly, Google Pay.

Both Nokia phones support working with two nano-SIMs, but the slots here are combined. that is, either a second SIM card or a microSD memory card. This is sad.

From above. Nokia 7.1, below. Nokia 5.1 Plus

But smartphones did not lose the 3.5 mm headphone output, which, among other things, allows the built-in FM-receiver to work (when connecting a headset). And this is good.

Screen and interface

Both Nokia 7.1 and Nokia 5.1 Plus received screens with an aspect ratio of 19: 9 and a “monobrow” on top. The main difference is that the older model displays 1080×2280 pixels, and the youngest. 720×1520 pixels. If the clarity of the picture is all right for both smartphones, then the readability of information on a sunny day is not so good for the younger model. Even Nokia 7.1 does not jump in brightness to the Honor 8X level (in which they also saved a bit on the screen), and the Nokia 5.1 Plus screen is frankly dim, and only a very cloudy Russian autumn masks this shortcoming. In summer, be ready to cover your screen with your palm to see what is happening on it.

And it seems that the color rendering is generally good. the colors are not oversaturated to a thermonuclear state, as in most Chinese smartphones, but a color temperature of about 8000-10000K means a frankly bluish display of white. Like lamps in night clubs or through tinted glass of a car. Nokia 7.1 has overkill compared to the norm (6500 K) up to 1.6 times. Of course, both smartphones have the setting of the so-called “night mode” or “reading mode”, where you can select any white balance and turn it on at least manually, at least on a schedule, but in this case you lose this switch itself if you reconfigure objectively uncomfortable white balance manually.

As a result, it remains either to get used to the blue-tinted white color, or to adjust the balance manually each time. For example, set it to about 8000K in the afternoon and lower it to 5000K in the evening (the setting does not give exact values, but you can orient yourself “by eye”). Nokia 5.1 Plus initially has a more pleasant color rendering, you can not change it, well, besides the very “reading mode”. in this case it’s enough to set it to the schedule so that it turns on in the evening and turns off in the morning.

Outwardly, in terms of processor and software, Nokia looks civilized, but in terms of display settings, they, alas, still remain “terry China” in the bad sense of the word.

As for the interface and software, both models are certified Android One, which means “clean” Android and regular updates. Nevertheless, although, for example, Nokia 7 Plus with the same Android One can already boast the ninth version of the OS, and Nokia 7.1 and 5.1 Plus still only work on 8.1. This is all the more strange given that the models are newer. And yes, of course, we checked for updates several times, including manually. Did not help.

Performance and autonomy

Given the difference in price, we should expect that Nokia 7.1 will be significantly “faster” than 5.1 Plus, but the younger model still pleasantly surprised me. True, the Geekbench 4 test failed to be launched on it. the application swears at the missing Internet connection, although other programs do not have problems with this. Googling showed that such an error occurs not only with us, but with all the other (including Western) colleagues who tried to test Nokia 5.1 Plus. In any case, the Helio P60, as you can see in the table on the example of Oppo F7, is initially a faster processor chip than the Snapdragon 636. No matter how unpleasant it is for the Media Library haters.