Nokia 6 (2018) Review

Last year's Nokia 6 was quite a popular mid-range phone though it did have its shortcomings, this year's model promises to bring things to the next level. This is our Nokia 6 2018 review.

NOKIA 6 (2018) DESIGN AND BUILD QUALITY

The Nokia 6 2018 is quite recognizable if you're familiar with last year's Nokia 6, back again is the anodized aluminum unibody with an angular look, the sides and back are totally flat with sharp edges, these allow for a really good grip, this phone will slip out of your hand easily, overall the build feels really sturdy yet comfortable, it isn't a water resistant though so not indestructible.

Our matte black model has copper accents around the edges, camera and the fingerprint reader adding a bit of flair, each of the color options has different color highlights. The camera does stick out a bit so the phone will wobble on a table, since the fingerprint reader is now on the back it frees up a little bit of space on the front it's always on and accurate.

Storage is either 32 or 64 gigs and it is expandable to the dedicated card slot, it's unfortunate that there is no stereo speaker setup this year, Nokia has gone back to a bottom firing speaker next to the USB C port, but the good news is that the speaker actually sounds better is louder with richer sound. You can plug in headphones to the 3.5 millimeter jack too and sound clarity is pretty good however plugging into an external speaker didn't give stellar results much like the Nokia 7 plus.

NOKIA 6 (2018) SCREEN

The screen of the Nokia 6 2018 is a 5.5 inch IPS LCD with 1080p resolution just like last year, it performs similarly in our test as well, brightness is alright for an LCD at 470 nits and the blacks are reasonably deep, but one thing that has gotten a massive boost is sunlight legibility. This LCD has one of the best scores we have measured so far even it’s beating most OLED.

NOKIA 6 (2018) OPERATING SYSTEM

The Nokia 6 2018 is part of the Android 1 program meaning it gets pure Android just like the Google Pixel, ours is running the latest Android Oreo 8.1, the UI runs quite fast though since all the functions are provided through Google's apps some might call it a bare-bones feature wise, regardless you will get the latest security updates as soon as a rollouts. 

NOKIA 6 (2018) CHIPSET

The biggest upgrade on the Nokia 6 2018 is improved performance it runs on a Snapdragon 630 chipset with 4 gigs of RAM which is miles ahead of last year's Snapdragon 430, in benchmarks that performs around 60% better and it runs smoothly even with pretty demanding games.

BATTERY

The Nokia 6 2018 is powered by a 3000 milliamp hour battery the same is on the previous model, although it's not the biggest battery life is good and during an endurance rating of 76 hours in our proprietary tests, the phone supports fast charging sort of, the provided 18 watt charger only filled 38% of the depleted battery in half an hour.

NOKIA 6 (2018) CAMERA

The Nokia 6 2018 has a 16 megapixel main camera with an F2.0 aperture and phase detection autofocus and this year it comes with a Zeiss branded lens. In good light photos are rich in detail and have accurate colors, dynamic range is about average though and so is sharpness and contrast and we didn't see any benefit of the new Zeiss lens over last year. In low-light there's not many good things to say images come out blurry, dark and with quite a bit of noise.

If you go into the camera's dedicated pro-mode you can take photos with a shutter speed of up to 4 seconds while those have plenty of detail and could have been great there's a lot of luminance noise in the way.

For selfies the Nokia 6 2018 has an 8 megapixel front snapper, the images turn out excellent sharp with lots of detail good colors and great contrast.

This year's Nokia 6 now has the capability for 4k video capture as well as 1080P, the video quality in both resolutions is great they're detailed and sharp with decent dynamic range, great contrast and spot-on colors, foliage looks nice and the noise levels are kept low.

Conclusion

So overall the Nokia 6 2018 is a solid mid-range as great build quality in a nice selfie cam and there plenty of improvements over last year too like the better chipset, great sunlight legibility and full Google support through Android 1. There are still some compromises you'll have to make like the camera is a bit of a letdown and there is no waterproofing, but for 270 Euros is understandable and the deal is only bound to get better over time.