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Why Nokia 2 may leave you unsatisfied

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DailyBiteNov 01, 2017 | 09:21

Why Nokia 2 may leave you unsatisfied

HMD Global-owned Finnish smartphone maker Nokia on October 31 announced its latest move to expand its foothold in the fast-growing sub-10k budget smartphone segment in the country.

Nokia, after its resurrection earlier last year, has increasingly put India at the heart of things, and by carrying out the global launch of the Nokia 2 – the company's new budget king – in the NCR region, the smartphone maker has once again stressed that it sees India becoming its prime revenue generator in the coming days. 

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Slated for a mid-November launch, the phone's price in India has not been announced yet. At the company's first global launch held in the country, the device has been announced at a price of Euro 99 (approximately Rs 7,500) which will effectively put it in a direct fight against other budget segment biggies like the Redmi 4A and even newer entrants such as Airtel-Karbonn A40 Indian, which is priced at approx Rs 4,000, but can be bought at an effective price of as low as Rs 1,399.

This 5-inch HD display device powered by Qualcomm's power-efficient Snapdragon 212 SoC paired with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage now becomes Nokia's most affordable smartphone with moderate specs.

There is also an 8-Megapixel main camera and a 5-Megapixel front shooter on board, both of which, on paper at least, fail to excite. But what the phone lacks in general specs it tries to get back with its battery and general usability.

The device comes with a large 4,100mAh battery that the company claims should provide two days of full battery should you use the phone for five hours a day.

Apart from supporting 4G VoLTE and dual-SIM – all features common to similarly-priced phones – Nokia's new offering comes running stock Android 7.1.1 Nougat out-of-the-box, which the company says will be upgraded to Android 8.0 Oreo soon. 

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There's no denying the charm of running a stock Android on the phone gives Nokia 2. It gives the smartphone a major advantage over the competition but with a price tag that could touch the Rs 7,500 mark, the phone will have to to do more than just provide good battery life with an up-to-date stock Android experience.

For a phone that will have to take on the might of Xiaomi in the form of Redmi 4A, there's simply not enough under the hood for the fight. And that's where its Achilles heel lies.

The Redmi 4A sports a 5-inch 720p HD display with a hybrid dual-SIM slot. It is powered by a 1.4GHz Snapdragon 425 SoC and comes in two variants with the more affordable 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage priced at Rs 5,999 and the other 3GB RAM and 32GB of inbuilt storage variant priced at Rs 6,999. 

Both the variants come sporting a 13-Megapixel rear camera with PDAF at the back and another 5-megapixel sensor with f/2.2 aperture at the front, making Xiaomi's Redmi 4A a much more attractive option compared to the Nokia 2 in the price segment. 

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However, there may still be light at the end of the tunnel for this device backed by Nokia's trusted name. The smartphone will greatly benefit from the vast network of more than 400 exclusive distributors covering 80,000 brick-and-mortar stores that Nokia boasts of in India. 

Regardless of the number of Nokia 2 handsets the company ends up selling, this will be far from being the best device that the budget buyer in the country deserves. 

After the success of the Nokia 3, which came with above-par specs at a very attractive price of Rs 9,499, the Nokia 2 — with its underwhelming specs — at the expected Rs 7,500 price point increasingly looks like a device that Nokia may just have gotten wrong. 

Last updated: November 01, 2017 | 09:21
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