A Weekend With Nokia 3 & Android Pie

On Friday I took my iPhone 8 in to an authorised repairer to get a new battery. I’ll get it back on Monday, but I’m spending the weekend with a Nokia 3 running Android Pie, or as it is known in our house, The Punishment Phone.

This phone is very, very slow. Watching it draw the UI feels like pages loading on dialup. I feel this makes it “unfair” to judge it but instead I’ll judge it all the more. Don’t want to be judged for making slow phones Nokia? Don’t make slow phones. This isn’t some carrier-branded $39 toy phone, it should work.

I only downloaded and installed the minimum I thought I would need to get by, given that I’ll still have my iPad. I installed:

  • Apple Music
  • Line / Line lite
  • Instagram
  • Snapchat

I also signed in so I got GMail and Youtube.

Things I didn’t install and I miss:

  • Tuner
  • Piano controller app

Things I like

  • I found a way to increase the UI density from Spaced Out to normal
  • I have an analogue clock widget

Things I don’t like

  • Jittery, laggy, garbage slow scrolling in every app but especially Chrome
  • Slow notifications for emails
  • Keyboard is slow to come up
  • Sometimes I get upset with how slow it is and mash buttons and that makes it worse
  • I hate capacitive buttons
  • I keep trying to do iPhone X gestures to navigate even though I’ve never owned an iPhone X
  • I want to edge swipe to go back or up a nav level but it opens the drawer I never want the drawer go away drawer
  • None of the apps I installed have wigets that work
  • The clock wiget doesn’t have numbers and I can’t work out how to change that or if it’s impossible

Things I don’t like that aren’t Android or Nokia’s fault

  • I can’t log into Line or Line Lite because my iPhone is in the repair shop so I can’t get a confirmation code and I don’t want to log my iPhone out