Nokia, at the recently concluded MWC 2017 event had unveiled a set of new phones which include Nokia 3, Nokia 5, and the global variant of Nokia 6. For the unaware, Nokia 6 was earlier limited to the Chinese market. While the official price for the Indian market has not been revealed yet, considering the European price, all the three handsets more or less fall in the budget category.
That said, for some people, though, the Nokia 6 may seem a bit on the higher end of the spectrum with the Nokia 3 being slightly underpowered for the asking price. That’s exactly where the Nokia 5 comes in. Priced between the two, the Nokia 5 is relatively specced well and seems to be the go-to phone for all the folks who have been waiting for the Nokia handsets to arrive in the country.
The question is, can Nokia 5 beat smartphones like Xiaomi Redmi 3s which has been in the Indian market for quite some time and more or less offer similar specs at nearly half of the price?
Beginning with design, both Xiaomi Redmi 3s and Nokia 5 offer an all-metal unibody design. However, visually speaking, the Nokia 5 looks a bit premium relatively. The design has been Nokia’s forte, after all.
While both the smartphones offer an HD resolution display, the Nokia 5 at 5.2-inches is slightly bigger than Redmi 3s’s 5-inch display. Additionally, Nokia 5 has a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass on the top.
Under-the-hood, both the smartphones have Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 SoC teamed with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of expandable (up to 128GB) storage space. The Nokia 5 has a 13MP camera at the back which is the same case with the Redmi 3s. At the front, though, the former has an 8MP camera as opposed to the 5MP camera on the latter.
The biggest difference comes in the form of battery. While the Redmi 3s has a huge 4,100mAh battery, Nokia’s offering has only 3,000mAh battery. As a matter of fact, we all know how good the battery life was on the Redmi 3s. Sadly, we can't comment on the Nokia 5’s battery life just yet.
On the connectivity front, Nokia’s offering provides support for LTE Cat. 4, GSM: 850/900/1800/1900, WCDMA: Band 1, 2, 5, 8, and LTE: Band 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 20, 28, 38, 40 whereas the Xiaomi Redmi 3s offers support for 4G FDD-LTE: B3/B5, TDD LTE: B40, 3G WCDMA 900MHz / 2100MHz, and 2G GSM 900MHz / 1800MHz. Both the phones offer support for 4G VoLTE.
Nokia 5 comes with Android 7.1.1 Nougat out-of-the-box, and the company claims to offer timely updates to the handset. On the other hand, Xiaomi’s offering still runs the Android 6.0 Marshmallow based MIUI 7.
As for the pricing, the Xiaomi Redmi 3s is priced at Rs. 6,999 whereas the Nokia 5 is priced at EUR 189 which is roughly Rs. 13,430. If you minus the timely Android updates and slightly better front-facing camera, the Redmi 3s is the clear winner. However, if you are a hardcore Nokia fan and are not willing to invest money on anything but Nokia 5, go on, no one will stop you. But do remember that at the same price you get the high-end Redmi Note 4 which is more or less the king of budget phones currently. If you can spare another Rs. 2,000 extra, you get the Lenovo Z2 Plus which is event better.
