Nokia 5.3 Unboxing and Review By Eric Okafor

Hey guys, it’s Eric here and this is my Nokia 5.3 unboxing and review. I have been using it for about 2 weeks now. First of, let’s see what we have in the box. When you slide this out you have your device wrapped in plastic, Let’s take out the sticker on the front. This is the charcoal color, it also comes in cyan and sand. you have an envelope that houses the sim ejection tool, a transparent TPU Case, let’s see how well it fits.

We have some manuals, product and saftety, get started guide, You can see all the 4G/LTE networks available here including Glo 4G band 28 which is the norm for Nokia anyway. There’s also NFC support. In a seperate compartment, you have a standard 10 watt charger, a USB type C cable and a pair of earphones. For everyone buying in the store, you’d get this 007 Kevlar case as a gift because Nokia partnered with the upcoming James Bond Movie, now this is an armoured case. That means it protects the front glass with that extra bit of raisivity.

You get texture on the sides but the back is smooth. I personally would not use this case coz the corners are sharp and feel like they’re poking in my hand. It also adds too much bulk for me. It was probably made for construction workers or people who are cursed with shattered screens. On the front, you have a 6.55 inch HD+ IPS LCD display with 20 by 9 aspect ratio. On the top of the display you have a tear drop notch that houses an 8 megapixel camera.

On the back, you have a 13 megapixel quad camera set up with flash. You also get a finger print sensor and some Nokia branding On the left you have a dedicated google assistant button and a 3 in 1 tray that holds 2 4G/LTE Nano SIM cards and an SD Card. On the right you have your volume rocker and a power button that lights up when you get a notification. Similar to the Nokia 7.2. On the top you have a 3.5mm headphone hack and a microphone On the bottom you have a second microphone, a USB type C port and a speaker. The Nokia 5.3’s design is unique for that circular camera layout with the flash in the middle. HMD Global choosing not to jump on the classic 2020 band wagon pays off sometimes because there are people who hate buying what’s common and whether or not you slap a case on this guy, it’s easy to tell it apart from other phones.

The camera bump doesn’t stick out too much. For an average sized phone, It’s neither heavy not light. The back and frame are made from plastic. The charcoal color does appear like matte black because there are near invisible diagonal lines on there. A neat trick to keep fingerprints hidden but it doesn’t feel the same as the composite material or the actual matte finish on the Nokia 7.2. On the front, the bezels are looking a little thick all around with a chin big enough to fit that Nokia branding on there.

Not sure why Nokia insists on doing that. Moving on, the screen is bright outdoors with great viewing angles. Gorilla glass 3 protection. Colors look vibrant and contrasty but it is only a HD display so YouTube videos are capped at 720P. Yes the display is a con but it’s not a deal breaker for this budget phone.

This phone is quite long, it is not ideal for one-handed use. The unit comes with 64 Gigs of storage and 6 gigs of ram. You get about 48 Gigs of available storage. We’re running on Android 10 and is it stock android so there’s little to no bloatware and no such thing as ads on here. No screen record feature by default but there are many 3rd party apps for that on playstore.

You get 2 years of software updates so we’re definitely getting Android S or 12 pushed to this phone. We get dark mode which is cool. There’s no option to hide the notch here and for me, it’s good riddance to bad rubbish. The gesture navigation is set as the default and I have gotten a hang of it but I am still a lot faster with the traditional navigation buttons which is an option. On the lock screen you get some cute animations, never noticed that before.

That Google assistant button can be disabled but cannot be reconfigured to some other function. Honestly, I don’t care for it coz I press it accidentally a lot. The Nokia 5.3 uses the Snapdragon 665 Octa-Core CPU clocked at 2.0GHZ and I am pretty accustomed to this chipset from my time with the Xiaomi Mi A3 and recently the Oppo A92, you should definitely check out my review of them, I’d be leaving links above. This isn’t one of the latest, super fast over-powered mid-range chips or a gaming chip but it is one of those above average speed, low heat running, good battery efficiency midrange chipsets. In terms of performance, on paper the Snapdragon 665 is better than the 660 but in real life it feels about the same as the Nokia 7.2, which in turn felt smoother than the Redmi Note 7 which runs on the same 660 CPU. This is all probably because Android One phones just run a lil bit smoother than phones with customised UI.

This means it will handle your every day apps and I got an overall satisfactory long term use. The RAM management is excellent. The fingerprint sensor doesn’t do well with locking and unlocking in quick succession and the animation is quite sluggish so it feels like you’re waiting an extra second for it to unlock but it is pretty accurate almost all the time. It may need an update to fix the other part tho. As for the less secure face unlock, it is slow even in good lighting, slower with indoor lighting and it doesn’t work in pitch darkness so may be don’t bother setting this one up.

Here’s how the speaker compares side by side the Xiaomi Mi A3When it comes to gaming, as usual I played PUBG on balanced graphics and medium frame rates, the highest PUBG setting for this phone. While it seems to be going smoothly on my end, you kinda see how the enemies are taking me out before I even get a chance. Now maybe I’m bad at this game, maybe my connection is bad or just maybe these guys are using gaming phones with much faster GPUs. It fairs better with Call of Duty than it does with PUBG and you can play these games for long periods of time without burning your hands. The Nokia 5.3 is powered by a 4000mAh battery and I put it through my usual battery test, about 5 hours of PUBG and a whole lot of time on social media all on WiFi. This gave me over 11+ hours of screen on time which is really impressive.

If you didn’t know this already, Nokia has one of the best battery optimisations in place No cap. This phone’s standby is over the top mind blowingly awesome. The average person will probably push 2 days out of this guy, it will do 10 hours of gaming non-stop and that’s what you get when a phone doesn’t heat up excessively no matter what you do on it. It took me 2 hours and 25 minutes for a full charge. It doesn’t not support fast charging.

The Nokia 5.3’s camera comes packed with a ton of features. Nokia is fond of being super generous even with midrange phones but you’d find that some of these features are quite gimmicky. For example the primary camera shoots 4K videos but doesn’t even have image stabilisation at 1080P and the video quality is below average. The front facing camera footage is over saturated which may actually go through the Youtube processing and turn out looking pretty good or let me know what you think. As for photograhy, using it outdoors, we get well saturated high dynamic range but all that the sharpness is lost with the image captured on the wide angle lens, which is to be expected.

Using a human subject, if you look around my hair up close, you’d see that the details aren’t all there but it will still look good on social media. Using portrait mode, you have an over saturated output but the depth sensing is amazing. The selfie camera is actually not bad outdoors. I like the skin tones. As for portrait mode, the depth sensing isn’t as good as what you get from the primary camera but it is consistent in terms of saturation levels.

This is one phone that absolutely needs GCAM to flourish especially indoors and I always pit it against the iPhone just so you know you can take amazing shots on your affordable phone as long as it supports GCAM. If you take a lot of photos indoors, GCAM will rock your world but if you’re the type of person who doesn’t like to see every single pore on your skin, all the roughness or signs of ageing, you may actually prefer the default camera outdoors and this applies to both the primary and selfie camera. Now GCAM can do a whole lot depending on the hardware it’s working with, like with this selfie, we see a clean clear difference between the default camera and GCAM but switching to the back camera, while we still see the difference, there’s only so much GCAM can do with this hardware and the lighting in the room. The night mode on this phone makes a small difference, you can see a lil more details with Night mode on but I don’t think any of these photos are usable. With GCAM and I didn’t even use night mode with GCAM, you can see a lot more details, now this is a picture you can actually share.

It’s hard to believe the same phone shot both of these. Every once in a while Nokia releases a budget phone with midrange specs at an affordable price and the Nokia 5.3 is exactly that. Nokia isn’t trying to win any spec to price ratio awards here coz you get more affordable phones with better specs from other brands like Xiaomi and Realme. However, there aren’t many android one options from them and there’s that whole tragic Mi A3 situation where multiple problematic updates and backlash caused Xiaomi to pull out from Android One program. When it comes to software updates, after Google Pixel, Nokia is the next best thing period.

I’d recommend this phone to people who don’t care for custom UIs or ads and people who use their phones for years. Other wise, I don’t think any of Nokia’s key selling points apply to you. You should probably check out my other phone reviews. Nokia 5.3 is priced at 79,000 naira which converts to $170 US dollars and you can pick yours up on Jumia using my affiliate link in the description If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up and share it, also follow me on Twitter or Instagram to see what i’m up to. Do subscribe for more videos like this as it will mean a lot to me and i’ll see you in the next one.

Peace.

Source : Eric Okafor