HMD Global has finally announced the launch of its first smartphone with a notch in India. Dubbed as Nokia 6.1 Plus, the smartphone comes with a price tag of Rs 15,999 and it will be exclusively available on Flipkart and Nokia Mobile Shop starting from August 30.
With this, HMD is all set to strengthen its position in the budget smartphone segment by offering you some exciting specifications along with a stock Android experience. However, the question here is, will it be able to counter the likes of Xiaomi Mi A2 and Asus Zenfone Max Pro M1? Let’s take a closer look.
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What we like about Nokia 6.1 Plus!
Starting with the design, the first thing you will notice about this smartphone is the lightweight. The phone weighs just 151 grams and it is 8mm thick, which makes it quite easy to hold and comfortable to use. The phone comes loaded with a top-notch, which has become a hygiene factor in the smartphone industry. And not to forget, the device comes loaded with a glass design. Check out the pictures of Nokia 6.1 Plus.
The notch is small as compared to other smartphones and bezels are minimal. The back featuresvertically-aligned dual rear cameras and there is a slight camera hump with silver lining (pun intended) around the camera module. The fingerprint sensor sits just beneath it and is also features a silver-coloured ring. That said, the phone comes loaded with a compact design and it is quite lightweight as well.
Coming on to the display, the Nokia 6.1 Plus features a 5.88-inch Full HD+ IPS LCD with a screen Resolution of 2280 x 1080 pixels and an aspect ratio of 19:9. The display looks promising as it can delivera reasonable level of colour saturation and text looks quite crisp. We felt the font size was smaller than usual, but have an option to change it by going to Settings > Display > Font Size.
We played a bunch of videos on this smartphone and found out that the colours look bright and detailing were on point. The phone was able to handle deep black quite effectively. However, the only problem we faced during our review was the reflective nature of the screen, which made it a difficult thing to look under direct sunlight.
Moving on to the performance, the Nokia 6.1 Plus is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 Chipset along with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. The lightweight user interface and Snapdragon 636 chipset combination give you a smooth performance. Whether be it multi-tasking between applications or just shuffling between different pages in Chrome, you will not face any lag or jitter. On the gaming front, the phone can handle casual games like Subway Surfers, Temple Run 2 and more quite effectively.
The phone runs on Android 8.1 Oreo and it falls under the Android One programme. This means that you get a Stock Android experience, which is available in the Google Pixel lineup. That said, the smartphone comes with minimal bloatware, the only apps you get is from Google.
The user interface is quite smooth to operate and you will not feel any lag while scrolling through the UI. Just like every other Android One smartphone, the phone also has a feature that automatically switches the notification panel and App drawer to white or black, depending upon the wallpaper. Apart from this, there are some gesture controls as well like swipe fingerprint for notification, mute on pickup, turn over to reject calls, double tap power button to open camera and more. The features come in handy sometimes or the other.
What we didn’t like about Nokia 6.1 Plus!
Although the design of the latest Nokia smartphone is compact, being a glass body, it is much more fragile and prone to fingerprints. It is highly recommended that you go for a back cover to give the phone more chances to survive a drop and keep yourself from repeatedly cleaning the smudges.
Coming to high-intense games, you will be slightly disappointed. Although it was able to handle most of the graphics-intensive games like Hitman Sniper, Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade and more, but when it comes with PUBG Mobile, we had our concerns. The settings were kept at the lowest by default. Under this setting, the gameplay was smooth, but the detailing and experience were not that breathtaking. We changed the settings to medium and saw that there were frame drops and noticeable lags. Further, the phone was overheating, so you might as well keep this thing in mind as well.
Coming to the camera performance, the Nokia 6.1 Plus does an excellent job of capturing photos when the lights are ideal. The colours were quite close to the source, although, the detailing was not that great. Further, we noticed that the phone was overexposing certain images. Coming to the low-light performance, the phone does a pretty average job. Although it was able to handle glares quite effectively, the photos came out to be pretty noisy and grainy. On the other hand, the selfie camera does a better job of clicking pictures and bothie feature is surely unique and exciting. Check out the Camera Samples of Nokia 6.1 Plus.
On the battery front, the Nokia 6.1 Plus gets its juice from a 3060mAh battery. The phone was able to last a full day under moderate usage. However, when it comes to power usage, it lasted not more than 6 hours. The power usage included streaming movies, listening to music, checking emails, calls, browsing the web and playing games at a regular interval of time. The battery is quite average and when compared to the likes of Asus Zenfone Max Pro M1 or Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro, the battery performance looks a bit underwhelming.