Nokia 4.2 Review: Good Design And Value For Money

Nokia has recently launched its new Nokia 4.2 in India with a price of the device comes with Android 9 Pie out of the box and with 3000mAh battery. Nokia 4.2 also comes with 13MP/ 2MP rear camera and 8 MP front camera with dedicated Google Assistant button. The key features include dual rear cameras, 5.71 inch display and the power key which also acts as a notification light. Priced at INR 10,990 for the 3/32GB storage variant, Nokia 4.2 looks quite impressive.

We had the Nokia 4.2 for some time and here is our review. First let us see the specifications of the Nokia 4.2.

Coming to the design of Nokia 4.2, you can see that Nokia has maintained the same Nordic design with curved edges with the rear cameras in the top middle of the rear with LED flash. Below that we can find fingerprint sensor. Simple Nokia branding is present below that. Nokia has glass front and back sandwiching the polycarbonate frame which looks elegant. The left side of the Nokia 4.2 has dual dedicated SIM and MicroSD card tray and below that is the dedicated Google Assistant button while the right side consists of the volume rockers and the power button. On the top of the smartphone, we can find the audio jack an on the bottom we can find micro USB port and speakers. We can easily hold the smartphone in the hand as the smartphone is slim with the weight of 161 grams.

The display of Nokia 4.2 consists of 5.71 inch HD+ display with 19:9 screen to body ratio. The screen resolution is of 720 X 1520 pixels and there is a 2.5D curved glass screen. There is a small selfie notch present in the top middle of the screen. The smartphone is not bezel free as we can see thin black line running around the top and the sides and we can see that there is a thicker chin appearing at the bottom. The front facing selfie camera is present at the top. The displays offer good colour reproduction both in indoors and outdoors. We can also have an interesting feature in this smartphone. The power button also acts as a notification light. Which means when you receive messages or calls the power button illuminates so that we can easily identify that there is some calls or messages we have got.

As far as the hardware concerns, Nokia 4.2 consists of Qualcomm Snapdragon 439 chipset with 3GB of RAM and the internal memory of 32GB. We also played some videos in it and we did not find any problems.

 It also has a battery capacity of 3000mAh. The battery lasts for approximately a day. The Adaptive Battery feature limits battery usage from apps you don’t use often, and App Actions predicts what you’re about to do so you can get to your next action quickly. These features further streamline your device’s functionality and your overall Android experience.

We can see that there is a dedicated Google Assistant button on the left which makes easy to access Google Assistant in just a press. You can double press the button to receive a visual snapshot of your day from the Google Assistant with intelligent suggestions and personalized information, including transport info, bills that need paying and what you have in your calendar to make sure you never miss a meeting again. By long pressing the button, you will activate a walkie-talkie mode, which lets the Google Assistant listen to you until you release it for long sentence queries. The Nokia 4.2 also lets you access your Google Assistant without unlocking your phone after opting-in through your settings. We feel that this is a good feature to have.

Nokia 4.2 comes with Android 9 out of the box with guaranteed upgrades for 2 years. We tried to use the smartphone with multiple tabs open. We did not see any lag in the device so far.

We also played PUBG using this smartphone. The game runs on low graphics mode only. There were no lags to be seen. The casual games like candy crush also was good with no frame drops.

Coming to the camera, Nokia 4.2 comes with 13MP/ 2MP dual rear camera and 8MP front camera. We tried taking some shots using the smartphone. The pictures came out well. The 13 megapixel main camera supported by 2 megapixel depth sensor gives a good bokeh shot. We can see that there is a Live Bokeh option in the camera through which we can adjust the blurring effect. This is quite interesting. We took some selfies and the camera produced average shots. The Google Lens feature present also lets us search what we see faster, and interact with the world around us.

Here are few of the pictures taken from Nokia 4.2.

The fingerprint sensor present in the Nokia 4.2 unlocks the device quickly, but the fingerprint sensor is little difficult to reach as it is present little low in the back of the device. Nokia 4.2 also has AI-augmented face unlocking system. We could see that the face unlock to be quite fast.

We also tried calling using the Nokia 4.2 both using JIO and Airtel and the call quality was good enough. The Nokia 4.2 has a single speaker but the output is good enough to listen to music and videos.

 There is two SIM slots present and a dedicated MicroSD card slot present in Nokia 4.2.

According to Nokia, “The Nokia 4.2 will receive three years of monthly security patches and two major OS updates, as guaranteed in the Android One program. In addition, Google Play Protect scans over 50 billion apps per day to keep your phone safe from malware, making the Nokia 4.2 among the most secure phones on the market.”

Verdict

Nokia 4.2 is looks good with all of its features with the price of INR 10,990. The dedicated Google Assistant button and the power button acting as a notification light makes the device good to buy. The camera performance is also good.