The Nokia 3 was a sluggish device last year, so my hopes were up when Nokia announced the Nokia 3.1, simply because it features a better class of processor. Specifically, it's jumped from the quad-core Mediatek MT6737 to the octa-core Mediatek MT6750. Sure, that's not a top-class processor, but an improvement was sorely needed over the Nokia 3.
The Nokia 3.1 also has the advantage of being an Android One phone, in line with most of the rest of Nokia's 2018 output. Android One devices offer clean Google interfaces with limited clutter and the promise of at least two year's worth of software upgrades, making them (in effect) mini-Pixel phones. Less bloatware should also equate to a nippier budget phone, right?
Technically, that is what you get, but Nokia's decision to build to a budget, and specifically to limit the model we're getting locally to the 16GB ROM/2GB RAM variant seriously affects the Nokia 3.1's overall performance.
In benchmark terms, it does manage to outclass last year's Nokia 3, but not in a way that compares all that well against its budget brethren. Here's how it compares using Geekbench 4's CPU test:
It's a less compelling story for graphics, where the Nokia 3.1 rendered the second worst benchmark scores we've seen, only besting the much cheaper Nokia 1:
Benchmarks can give you a comparative impression, but they're not the whole story of a phone's performance. I had hoped that the Nokia 3.1 might punch above its benchmark weight in day-to-day performance, but it simply isn't the case. If you're only running a single app it's fine for its budget space. As soon as you've got any kind of multi-tasking running, even if it's as simple as having music playing in a background app while you browse the web, the RAM limit bites in hard, and you're left waiting, often for seconds at a time. Sure, budget phones are never going to be super-fast, but the Nokia 3.1 is just notably slow.
