Nokia 6, Nokia 5 and Nokia 3 review: HMD's low-priced phones are simple but impressive

Running pure Android, coming in at reasonable prices and outperforming many of their mid-to-low-range contemporaries, a trio of new Nokia smartphones look to pick up the mantle dropped by Google's erstwhile Nexus brand.

The Nokia 6, 5 and 3 are the first phones from HMD global, a company created to carry on the legacy of the once-beloved Nokia name, and while there's talk of a Nokia 8 on the horizon — with true flagship specs and Carl Zeiss optics — these less expensive phones compromise on some luxury features to deliver a pretty attractive value proposition. Well, at least two of them do.

The Nokia 6 looks and feels cold and utilitarian, but also looks much more expensive than it is.  Nokia 6

A sleek and solid handset with a $399 price tag, the Nokia 6 is the easiest of the bunch to recommend. Like all three phones it runs a virtually untouched current version of Android, with the promise of immediate software updates whenever they're issued by Google.

With a minimalist aluminum facade in black or silver, the 6 bucks the budget phone trend of looking like an imitation iPhone or Galaxy, appearing instead somewhere between a Lumia and one of Google's own phones.

In fact it's almost the exact same size, weight and shape as Google's Pixel XL, with a 5.5-inch screen on the front, sandwiched top and bottom with some decently-sized bezels. The fingerprint scanner — doubling as a capacitive home button and sitting between light-up back and recent buttons — is a bit low and makes one-handed unlocking perilous, but it works well. Of course the Nokia 6 is a third of the price of Google's flagship, and it's not hard to see where money was saved.

The 1080x1920 LCD here is nowhere near the quality of a Sony LCD, let alone an OLED you might find on the Pixel or Samsung's Galaxy S8, and out of the box it's quite blue (although you can fix that with some tinkering). The body might be physically similar to Google's phone, but it feels less refined — albeit just as sturdy — in the hand with sharp chamfered edges. The Nokia 6 also doesn't sit flush on a horizontal surface, with its slight camera bulge allowing it to rock from side to side.

Internally the Snapdragon 430 is an understandable choice of chipset for mixed use, but its age is starting to show and it won't set any records as far as performance goes. The 3GB of RAM is similarly middling. Noodling around the operating system is smooth and snappy on the Nokia 6, but the lack of grunt is noticeable when playing games or during quickfire multitasking.

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While the cleanliness of the operating system is appreciated, I also thought the design work on the native apps — i.e. Downloads, Settings, Camera — was pretty poor. All are blue circles with white icons, which can make for a dull and confusing home screen. Thankfully HMD has pre-installed Google's own apps wherever possible, although a good number of those share the rounded blue aesthetic as well.

Nokia and Google both have a thing for blue circles. Photo: Tim Biggs

All this said, the 6 is impressive for the price. The primary camera is competent with strong, quick autofocus and a powerful flash, even if photos and videos are lacking in the colour department. The built-in speakers — a stereo pair, which is unusual — pack a surprisingly big punch. While the 32GB of internal storage is smaller than ideal, it supports microSD cards up to 128GB.

Battery life is fine but not phenomenal, withstanding a full day of light use, and the screen stays legible outdoors, which are two areas budget phones often fail.

The Nokia 6 and 5 are much more similar than the 5 and 3. Photo: Tim Biggs

I wish HMD had chosen to go with USB C instead of the old microUSB. Aside from the fact that my brain has already forgotten how to use non-reversible plugs for charging, adopting the current standard would have really helped charging speeds. Some degree of protection against water and dust would also have been nice.

It's hard to complain too much at $400 though. This is a capable and no-nonsense phone that strikes a good balance between capability and cost, and lets a lot of the great things about Google's Android ecosystem shine through.

The smaller Nokia 3 and Nokia 5.  Nokia 5 and Nokia 3

At the lower end, the Nokia 5 and Nokia 3 are priced at $329 and $249 respectively. But while it's clear they both offer a good amount of phone for those prices, the question is whether $250 worth of phone is enough to suit your needs.

As the names suggest, the 3 sits significantly below the 6 when it comes to specs, with the 5 sitting between them but closer to the 6. Physically the 5 greatly resembles a slightly smaller 6, with the 3 swapping the aluminum build for plastic and dropping the fingerprint scanner altogether.

Both phones feature 720p screens, down from the 6's 1080p, although you get a bit more real estate on the 5: a 5.2-inch screen versus the 3's 5 inches. Both feel nice in the hand with smooth finishes and rounded edges, although since the 5 keeps the metal but drops the sharp edges it's a bit more slippery than its two brothers.

Both phones feature a meagre 2GB of RAM, and while the 5 sticks with the same mid-range octa-core Snapdragon CPU as the 6, the 3 has a cheaper quad chip from Mediatek. 16GB is all the space you get built-in on these phones, but thankfully they still support microSD.

Unfortunately there are just a few too many cut edges on the Nokia 3 for me to recommend it. It's very slow, the screen colour is poor, the battery life is sub-par and the quality of the primary camera appears to be worse than what I generally expect from a front-facing selfie cam. It might be a good-looking small phone running a clean version of Android, but even for $250 you can probably do better.

The 5 is a better choice, with battery life and primary camera are at least as good as it larger sibling, and with only a modest drop in performance. If you like a bigger screen it's definitely worth the extra $70 to go for the 6, but otherwise The Nokia 5 is a great mid-range phone at a budget price.

Source: Nokia 6, Nokia 5 and Nokia 3 review: HMD's low-priced phones are simple but impressive