Nokia has launched 3 Android powered smartphones at the MWC 2014 and the biggest of the lot is the Nokia XL. The smartphone will be a sub Rs 10,000 smartphone and will cost about Rs 9,300 when it touches down on Indian shores. It will surely make a lot of people happy in future. Let us have a quick review of the smartphone:
Camera and Internal Storage
The Nokia XL has been given a 5MP camera with autofocus and a LED flash at the rear. It is joined in by a 2MP camera up front. The smartphone features a pretty decent camera unit for a sub Rs 10,000 device and its quality is expected to be better than some of the budget 8MP snappers you get in this price range.
Its internal storage stands at 4GB and the same can be expanded with the help of a microSD card by another 32GB. This is exactly what most budget phones feature so we are not complaining in this regard.
Battery and Processor
Nokia XL gets a 2,000 mAh battery unit to give it the juice which has been rated by the company to provide 26 days Standby and 13 hours of talk time on 3G. The smartphone comes with a pretty good talk time support as you usually do not get the same in the segment it will be entering.
The processor is a 1GHz dual core Snapdragon S4 Play which it shares with its other siblings. This is also decent enough but Android devices don’t run as smooth as Windows devices on dual core processors so we’ll need to see if Nokia has optimized it well to run smoothly.
Display and Features
It gets a 5 inch IPS LCD display with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. The display resolution might just seem a bit overstretched on such a big screen big screen but you can’t really expect 720p units when you are on a budget.
It runs on AOSP code which has Lumia tile based UI on top of it and you can get applications from the Nokia store or the popular Yandex store. You can side load applications on to your microSD card so find applications won’t be an issue.
Looks and Connectivity
It comes in a slew of colours. You get black, white, yellow, organe, green and cyan colour options and the smartphone has a good build quality. It surely looks like a device from the higher segments. It looks like just the right mix of Lumia and Asha series and will get a single back button up front.
Nokia will ensure that you remain connected at all times and you will get 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS support with the smartphone.
Key Specs
Model | Nokia XL |
Display | 5 Inch, 800 x 480 pixels |
Processor | 1 GHz dual core Snapdragon S4 Play |
RAM | 768 MB |
Internal Storage | 4 GB, expandable upto 32 GB |
OS | AOSP code with Lumia interface and fastlane Asha interface on top of it |
Cameras | 5 MP / 2 MP |
Battery | NA |
Price | 109 Euros |
Conclusion
The Nokia XL is a smartphone that will open up an all new segment globally as you don’t find devices running on forked version of Android very often. You don’t get Google play store support but you get Nokia store instead. But you can always side-load applications from third party stores and that shall solve the problem for many. Expect it to be priced below the Rs 10,000 mark when it goes on sale in early second quarter of 2014.