Nokia X review: Under cover

Snappy image gallery

The gallery on the Nokia X lists all of your albums. In addition to the album view, it also supports sorting by location and time.

The Gallery

Images are shown in a grid of three by four that is vertically scrollable. You can pinch or double-tap to zoom on images. You can also share photos via email or Bluetooth and edit them. Editing options include rotating, flipping, cropping, lighting and contrast adjustment and adding color effects.

Viewing and sharing images

You can set images as wallpapers, add them to favorites, see details and start a slideshow from the pull-up context menu.

Editing an image

Asha-like music player

The Nokia X music player has a tabbed interface with four tabs - songs, artists, albums and playlists. Customizable equalizers are available from the advanced menu.

Music Player

The now playing screen shows the usual controls - shuffle, repeat, play/pause, next and previous songs. There is a scrubber, which you can use to skip parts of the song. Album art is available too.

Now Playing

The song will keep playing even if you exit the player - you get a shortcut in the Fastlane and on the lockscreen with play-pause-skip controls readily available.

Music controls in lockscreen and Fastlane

Video player is part of the gallery

There is no dedicated video app, but all of your videos get listed in the gallery instead. You can share, delete or view detailed information from the swipe-able menu at the bottom of the screen.

The Nokia X is technically capable of playing 3GP/MP4/MKV videos up to 1080p resolution, but 720p or higher res usually results in lots of jerkiness and dropped frames, so we'd stick to SD if we had to use this one as a portable player. AC3 audio codec are supported, which is nice. DivX and XviD video codecs are not supported though.

The Nokia X video player

The Now Playing screen offers very basic user interface with just a Play/Pause button and a scrubber.

Stereo FM radio with RDS

The FM radio on Nokia X comes with a neat and simple interface. It supports manual tuning via a dedicated tool at the bottom. You can scroll between stations too, and you can save up to four favorite stations.

The FM radio app

Just like with the music player, the FM radio will keep playing when you exit the app - you get a shortcut in the Fastlane and on the lockscreen with the station information and an off switch.