Tuesday, January 26, 2021

Nokia 3.4 Review

2020 has been an exciting year for smartphones, as many brands are truly upping up their game when it comes to the entry-level segment. Of course, HMD Global also has its offering with the Nokia 3.4. Here’s our full review of the Nokia 3.4.

Design and Construction

Although Nokia 3.4 isn’t the most attractive smartphone, there is, it looks pretty okay. As we mentioned in our hands-on, the phone does feel kind of “cheap” due to its plastic body, but the embossed plastic design is a nice touch, and it reduces fingerprint smudges on the phone. It comes with a good grip and is comfortable to hold due to its slim profile. The unit we have is in Fjord, but you can also get in Charcoal.

Here on its rear, we can find its protruding circular camera module, a circular fingerprint scanner, and the Nokia branding. You may also use the fingerprint scanner to bring down the navigation bar, which is cool.

Upfront, we can find its 6.3-inch HD+ display, punch hole notch, call speaker, and another Nokia branding down on its chin.

Found on the right side are the power/lock button plus the volume rocker.

While on the left side, we have its dual nano-SIM card slot with a dedicated MicroSD slot and a dedicated Google Assistant button that you can also disable in the settings. We have to say that it’s pretty handy, but we almost always mistook it for the power button.

Up top, we got the 3.5mm audio port alongside the secondary noise-canceling microphone.

Down at the bottom resides its primary microphone, USB Type-C port, and speaker grilles.

Display and Multimedia

As for the display, the Nokia 3.4 sports a sizeable 6.39-inch IPS LCD screen with 720 x 1560 pixels. Color reproduction is good, and watching videos is immersive. It gets decently bright outdoors, and you can utilize the Night Light feature to reduce eye strain in low-light conditions. Also, there’s no way to hide the notch.

Audio-wise, it’s subpar. It sounds tinny when set at max volume, but you can use the retail unit’s included earphones to enhance the listening experience.

OS, UI, and Apps

The Nokia 3.4 runs on Android 10, so yes, we get pure Android in here. The UI is clean and straightforward, and we loved it. We get the usual Google apps, and that’s pretty much it. It’s also worth noting that this device is guaranteed to upgrade to Android 11 soon.

As for additional features, it comes with Digital Wellbeing and parental control to keep track of screen time and add content restrictions, and set other limits to help your child balance screen time. Out of the 64GB storage, we get a usable 48GB storage that can be further expanded via microSD.

Camera

The Nokia 3.4 comes with a triple rear camera setup consisting of a 13MP primary camera, 5MP ultra-wide, and 2MP depth. We get an 8MP one for selfies.

As for image quality, they’re average. Photos look decent and sharp in good lighting, though there are shots that look a bit washed out and some a bit saturated. Despite that, we appreciate the little distortion coming off from the ultra-wide lens. The portrait mode tends to struggle a bit in separating the subject from the background. As for low-light shots, well, they’re pretty underwhelming but usable. The night mode does little help to improve the shots, so there’s that.

Selfies turned out decent in good lighting conditions, though let’s not expect much when it comes to low-light.

Video-wise, the 3.4 can shoot up to 1080p at 30fps. It doesn’t come with any stabilization, just in case you’re wondering.

Performance and Benchmarks

This phone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 460 CPU, Adreno 610 GPU, and 4GB RAM on the performance side. Navigating the UI and launching apps is pretty smooth, though we noticed slowness when many apps are running in the background. Nonetheless, everything’s fine.

However, one major factor that we dislike about the performance is its fingerprint scanner and face recognition. They work, okay, but they’re slow and takes a while to unlock.

AnTuTu v8 – 112,348
PCMark – 5,770 (Work 2.0)
3D Mark – 864 (SSE – OpenGL ES 3.1), 809 (SSE – Vulkan)
Geekbench 5 – 256 (Single-core), 1,281 (Multi-core)
Androbench – 306.03 MB/s (Read), 246.45 MB/s (Write)

As for gaming, we tried playing PUBG Mobile and Genshin Impact, and they run quite okay, though, of course, there were frame drops and lags here and there.

Connectivity and Battery Life

Connectivity-wise, the Nokia 3.4 is packed with the usual WiFi, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS, FM Radio, and USB Type C 2.0

For battery life, this phone is packed with a 4,000mAh battery, and what can we say? It is probably one of its strongest suits. It took us a day or two to empty the battery on moderate usage. However, the 10W charging is average as it juiced up the phone in 2 hours or so.

In the PCMark Battery Test, the phone yielded 20 hours and 15 minutes, while our standard video loop test got a total score of 22 hours and 21 minutes.

Conclusion

Now let’s talk about the price. The Nokia 3.4 is priced at PHP 7,990, and honestly, we think it’s a good phone but too steep for its league. We still stand by our word that there are better-specced smartphones at this price range, but hey, it’s Nokia.

You get an excellent battery life on this phone and a widescreen real estate, and not to mention, it’s pure Android! So if those are just some of the aspects you look for in a phone, then the Nokia 3.4 is one good choice.

Nokia 3.4 specs:
6.3-inch HD+ display
Qualcomm Snapdragon 460 CPU
4GB RAM
64GB storage
microSD up to 512GB
Triple-rear cameras:
• 13MP primary
• 5MP ultra-wide
• 2MP depth
8MP front camera
Dual-SIM (nano)
4G LTE
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth 4.2
Qualcomm aptX audio adaptive
GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS, GALILEO
NFC (select markets)
USB Type-C
Fingerprint scanner
Face Unlock
3.5mm headphone jack
Google Assistant button
Android 10 (Android 11 ready)
4,000mAh battery w/ 10W charging
160.97 x 75.99 x 8.7 mm
180 g
Fjord, Dusk, Charcoal