The Nokia 1 is the first phone we've seen in Australia to be running Android Oreo Go, the specifically optimised version of Android 8.0 for budget devices. The Nokia 1's specifications are certainly low end, with a quad-core Mediatek MT6737M processor on board, matched up with just 1GB of RAM and 8GB of onboard storage.
That's not a recipe for benchmark success, and the Nokia 1 certainly performed poorly on our standard benchmarks to arrive dead last in every benchmark it completed:
Its 3DMark Slingshot Extreme score was notably poor, although to be fair we've tested very few budget handsets with this particular benchmark. Some lower cost handsets simply refuse to run it:
Benchmarks can give you a comparative basis, but they're not the entire story as they don’t precisely represent the Nokia 1's performance. While it's a cheaply-built handset with low-end internal components, it runs Android Oreo Go which makes a huge
difference in terms of its day-to-day performance.
Android Oreo Go comes with specifically optimised "Go" versions of most of the standard Android Apps, specifically built to work on lower-end phones with less impact on system performance. They really do make the most out of the Nokia 1's limited grunt, letting it effectively work as though it was a much better phone than it is. Expect slow transitions and a little lag here and there because this is still a cheap phone, but it's one that runs better than it has any right to.
If you don't like the Go versions of apps, you're not actually blocked from installing any given app from the Play store, as long as you can handle a little sluggish performance. Games predictably suffered the most in this respect, with many popular titles effectively unable to run in a satisfying way. However, it seems fair to say that this isn't the target market for the Nokia 1.
The other big benefit with getting an Android Oreo Go phone is that, like Android One phones, the actual security and software updates are essentially handled by Google, rather than manufacturers or network partners. This puts the Nokia 1 in a unique position, as it's easily one of the cheapest Android 8 phones in Australia, as well as one of the cheapest phones guaranteed to see security updates in a timely fashion. That's a big plus given some of the large scale security issues we've seen on the Android platform in recent years.
One oddity with the Nokia 1's performance is in its wireless performance. It will only talk to and see 2.4Ghz b/g/n networks, which threw me at first in our test environment where the network was working as a 5GHz entity at the time. 2.4Ghz is still far more common, but if you're using 5Ghz exclusively for its increased throughput, the Nokia 1 won't talk to you.