Nokia 1 revisted review: 3 years using Android Go as a daily driver

There are a number of Android Go handsets available on the market, but I’ve only had experience of using the Nokia 1, so my review will follow my experiences of using it as a daily driver for over 3 years.

I had used a Nokia 620 as a daily driver for work in a previous job, and it served me well for a number of years, but as Windows Phone began to wind down I was on the lookout for another Nokia handset which this time ran Android.

HMD who had licensed the brand from Nokia had slowly begun to market their new phones around the time I started looking and were building up a smartphone range which would cover entry level to flagship and number it accordingly with the Nokia 1 series being the entry-level phone and Nokia 9 series being the flagship at the time.

What is the Nokia 1?

Around 2018 the Nokia 1 was launched as part of this strategy and ran Android GO Oreo (8.1) and came with a 4.5-inch LCD screen (small by today's standards) in a resolution of 480 x 854 pixels, and didn’t weigh much 131g with an all plastic front, back and plastic frame and had a nano SIM tray.

Camera wise it had a single 5mp camera ath the back with an LED flash and could record video at 480p and a 2mp front facing camera.

Processor wise it had a MediaTek MT6737M, Quad-core 1.1 GHz Cortex-A53 CPU and a Mali-T720MP1 GPU, came with 8 GB internal memory (expandable with SD card) and only 1 GB of Ram. It came with a 3.5 mm headphone jack, which was nice (flagship smartphones seem to lack this).

Towards the end of 2018 I purchased a Nokia 1 in a pleasant red colour which I intended to use for work as my daily driver since I preferred to keep my personal phone separate from work.

What has it been like to use?

The Nokia 1 proved to be quite a nippy phone which was more than capable of running a small suite of apps and work related ones.

Work specific apps were basically Forti-token which was used to generate pass codes for me to access the work VPN, Gmail, Outlook and WhatsApp. Nothing too taxing, really.
AntennaPod is my go-to app for Podcasts and worked particularly well for my commute home where I made use of it all the time to keep up to date with my favourite podcasts.

There were some Apps I disabled or uninstalled to make room on the phone as it came with only 8 GB of memory, although it was expandable using SD card though it was important to note that not all apps can be moved or installed on SD card.

Some key changes I made were to uninstall the Go versions of Google Maps, mainly as they came as two apps and didn’t do turn by turn voice navigation, which I needed. The Full version of Google Maps apps do work, so in this case I installed Google Maps and saved an offline copy of the map I required on the phone.  

And until we had to all work at home, I used it to navigate to work or to visit clients. It still worked sufficiently well to guide me to work on a daily basis, as my commute is fairly long.

In terms of Go or Lite apps, I made use of Twitter lite and used the Opera browser (to cut back on data usage). With the Opera browser, I bookmarked Instagram, so I accessed the web version rather than burdening the phone by having too many apps installed.

I’m not too big a social media user, which helps, and was only using the phone to check on work related things and communicating with my colleagues using WhatsApp and snapping the occasional picture for work.

Did you make any changes?

Aside from those apps, I had various launchers installed, mainly as I get bored with one look all the time and like to make changes to my phone. Launchers allow you to customized the look of your phone and change how your phone works.

I did find that due to the screen size and resolution, some launchers didn’t work too well and ran sluggish due to the low ram availability. I’d recommend Lawnchair if you want to keep the original look but with more customization options. 

Hopefully that gives you some idea of how I used the phone on a daily basis, but how does it fare after more than 3 years of usage.

How does it fare after more than 3 years of usage?

It’s still quite a capable handset, though I've noticed the odd slow down here and there when I burden it with too much. There were a few odd bugs here and there.

The only issue I have had recently has been the phone didn’t seem to pinpoint me properly on the map. This may have been that the phone came with no compass, but it did come with A-GPS. It might be apps are starting to get big in file size and the phone is running out of ram and memory (even with the use of SD cards to expand the memory).

Should you pick one if you can find one? If you are looking for a phone that behaves like a flagship phone, this is definitely not for you. But if you’re aware of its capabilities and are a bit of a minimalist in that you only need the bare essentials, then I would certainly recommend this to you. It makes as an especially good phone for the elderly and as a festival phone too.

And if it isn’t available any more, take a look at the other Nokia Android GO series offerings or even Android Go offerings from other manufacturers.