Nokia 6, 5 and 3 hands-on: A closer look

Nokia 5

The Nokia 5 is another metal unibody entry by the company. You can tell it apart from the 6 by its size (5.2" screen instead of 5.5") and the camera assembly on the back is longer. It quite reminds us of a similar metallic strip on the back that the Nokia 800 had.

Nokia 5

The 5 does a better job of concealing its antenna lines, they have been pushed off the back and onto the top and bottom sides of the phone. For a €190 phone, this one easily has one of the best builds we have ever seen.

The screen on the front is a 5.2" IPS LCD panel with 720p resolution. That sounds a bit low, but we didn't mind it. By the way, the Nokia 5 screen did not have the same issue with polarized glasses as the 6. It's supposed to be a bit brighter too, 500nits vs. 450nits.

This one has less RAM (2GB) but the same Snapdragon 430 chipset as the 6. Thanks to the clean Android install, everything was flying - we didn't feel like we were using a 4-series chip. Perhaps this speed will degrade over time as you load up more apps and Android itself becomes more complex. We'll see.

Nokia 5

The Nokia 5 comes with a 13MP camera with slightly larger pixels than 6's 16MP shooter - 1.12µm vs. 1µm. And you still get Phase detection AF, dual-LED flash and 1080p video recording.

Nokia 5 camera samples

By the way, the Camera app is the one place where the Nokias diverge from the Google Pixel software (they have the Pixel launcher and everything). Instead you get the AOSP camera, which works just fine - the only reason we mention it is that we would have liked to get the HDR+ mode. Google did open up Assistant to all Androids, so maybe we'll get HDR+ on non-Pixels at some point too.