I'm the first to admit, when it comes to phones, I am extremely spoiled.

I regularly get to try some of the latest and greatest handsets available, from most of the big brands. Thousand-dollar phones, two-thousand dollar phones... yes, even three-thousand dollar phones.

Don't worry; I'd personally never spend three-thousand dollars on a phone - not even if I won Lotto - but it's fun to have a go on one.

Then there's the other end of the scale.

To be honest, lately sub-$1000 phones perform pretty well too. Even the under-$500 market constantly surprises me. Sure, features like water resistance and wireless charging are unlikely to make the price-cut here but it's not unusual to get great battery life, big screens and decent photos for just a few hundred bucks.

But what does $169 get you?...

 

The Nokia 1.3 is probably the most entry-level device I've reviewed for some time. As such, I was somewhat unprepared.

Because I'm reviewing phones all year long, I've become pretty good at setting them up. Cloning my apps, pictures, contacts and messages from one device to another is basically second nature to me now and I can usually be up and running on a new device in well under an hour. Not this time.

I completely underestimated the technical limitations of the Nokia 1.3.

We're dealing with just 16GB of internal storage and a mere 1GB of RAM. That's not a typo; ONE GB. I had no idea there were still phones for sale so underpowered.

 

Before I could start setting up the Nokia 1.3, I had to figure out how to put my SIM card in. This process was basically an exercise in time travel; there's no popout SIM tray here, instead you have to remove the whole back cover. Even that is problematic - the cover fits completely flush with the rest of the casing. In theory, you're supposed to be able to work your fingernail in there somewhere to pop it off. No chance. I ended up flexing the whole handset as much as I felt comfortable with and using a plastic phone-repair tool I happened to have in a cupboard. Not ideal. On the bright side, at least you don't have to remove the battery to get to the SIM slots and microSD tray. Unfortunately, the main SIM slot is jammed hard against the phone's chassis, making it very fiddly to insert your SIM card and virtually impossible to remove.

I did get there eventually and was finally able to push the power button. Then I waited. In theory, setting up the Nokia 1.3 is just like setting up any other Android device. That's the second time I've used the phrase, "In theory." It won't be the last. Yes you can still add your Google account and restore your apps, settings, contacts etc... but every step takes a very long time and on my first attempt, I basically had to give up and start again. I usually run about 120 apps on my phone - I don't know if that's above or below average but it's not normally a problem. (I actually have heaps more installed but I only regularly use about 120) Given the Nokia 1.3 only has 16GB of storage to begin with and a fair chunk of that is used up by the operating system, I soon realised I was going to have to take a vastly different approach.

I reset the device and didn't load any apps at all. That's not to say there are no apps on it already. The Nokia 1.3 runs on the Android 10 (GO edition). Supposedly this is more secure and helps make low-spec devices like this run faster and more efficiently. It doesn't. There are "GO" branded versions of Google Assistant and Gallery that come pre-installed and they seem to work okay. But the GO Camera is a whole other story we'll get to in a minute. Other apps like Chrome take several seconds to load and you can't add any widgets to the home screen at all. 

Weirdly, unlike many other phones, you can set the home screen to rotate from profile to landscape but it takes an age for the internal gyros to register you've tipped the phone over and actually turn the display to match. Everything feels sluggish - even unlocking the phone takes forever. Again, weirdly, you can face unlock, although I found this only worked in good light about 20 percent of the time.

The selection of shortcuts available from the pulldown menu on the notification bar is extremely limited - you can't even mute or unmute the phone from there. At least because this is kind of a version of Android 10, features like Dark Mode are still an option. 

Just when other manufacturers are giving up on dedicated buttons for their virtual assistants, you'll find one on the Nokia 1.3. Annoyingly, it's directly opposite the power button, so I often accidentally set it off when trying to open the phone.

 

As for that camera. It almost caused me physical pain to try and use. I don't know if it's a hardware thing, a software thing or a combination of the two but the app is so laggy, in most cases whatever you want to take a picture of will be long gone by the time you start the camera, zoom in, focus and push the capture button. I'm not exaggerating. Most times I'd push the button and have to wait more than a second for the shot to save - sometimes it wouldn't work at all - especially if I was trying to zoom in.

 

What's super odd is the few pictures I did manage to click off weren't terrible. A little dull and dark perhaps but generally the focus ended up being okay and there's even a portrait mode for the blurred background effect - although as you can see from this selfie, the blurring isn't particularly accurate. Pretty hard to tell where my head ends and the background starts. If I had to say something nice about the Nokia 1.3's camera performance, I'll admit the low-light effort isn't the worst, given all the other limitations.

The Nokia website claims "all day battery performance" from the 3000mAh removable cell. You might just get through a day on a full charge if you don't overtax things too much but I'd keep a charger handy, just in case. Micro-USB connector of course, nothing as fancy as USB-C here.

As much as I dislike using this phone, there are couple of highlights. The rear-mounted mono speaker actually plays audio reasonably loudly, there's a physical headphone jack if that's your thing and I found bluetooth audio to be clear and stable. The 5.71" HD+ screen is also very pleasant to use - extremely clear and bright - although the adaptive brightness takes ages to adjust (like everything else). What really surprised me was the Nokia 1.3's streaming ability - I could queue up and view Netflix with no issues at all, in fact picture quality was excellent. There's always a downside with this phone though and in terms of display it's the massive water-drop notch, top and centre. It's big enough for a selfie lens three times the size of the one that's there - very poor design indeed.

The Nokia 1.3 is compact, it's light and it has a good screen. But if you want to do anything more than text, call and watch a few Netflix shows, get ready to wait a while for some pretty basic functions to happen. There's a lot of theory and not enough reality to match up to it here.

If this is what $169 buys you, I'd wait and save up for something better.

Click here for more information and pricing on the Nokia 1.3.