Nokia 6.1 Plus: A Total Flop

I think everyone that's in their twenties remembers when Nokia was the number one cell phone and were on top of the world, so when I saw their new phones were coming out sans-Microsoft, I was more than a little excited! My Darling had been looking for a new phone for a while after becoming disappointed with his first iPhone, so I thought this was the perfect phone for him! It wasn't overly expensive either, which seemed a little too good to be true, but we figured the price might have to do with the slump they'd been in during the disaster that was their partnership with Microsoft. We decided to give it a go and bought a Nokia 6.1 Plus as it was the newest model at the time and the videos we saw online seemed to show a very advanced and amazing phone!!!

I'm sorry to say that the phone we got was anything but. 


When I first got it, it looked like a very good phone! It was around the same size as my s8, if not a little better, which seemed even better! My Darling is almost six feet and his hands are so big that most phones seem like the little plastic phones toddlers play with lol 

The 6.1 Plus next to an s8 for comparison

The thing that we were very excited about was the "bothie" mode, a feature that lets you take a picture from both sides at the same time!!! It seemed like one of the most exciting features, but this is where we ran into our first problems:

As you can see: the camera quality isn't very good :/ The bothie made seemed very exciting in the ads that Nokia had put out, but in reality, it's very hard to get a good picture that isn't blurry on one or both ends. 

I'll admit it was still pretty exciting that there are two different modes for this kind of a picture:

The camera on in its normal setting, isn't very good either, and despite claiming to have an HD level of quality, almost every picture I took came out looking blurry or very low quality. I think I speak for everyone when I say that no one wants to have bad quality photos :( And my Darling being Deaf, the camera is the most important part of the phone! 

6.1 Plus vs S8 picture quality

Another thing that's very disappointing is that you cannot enable the HD quality and picture correcting options at the same time :( My skin is very splotchy and I normally use this option on my phone to help even it out a little bit, so this was very disappointing. I'm sure my Darling isn't quite as interested in this option as I was, but it's still another let down. 

It seems like with this phone, we ran into problem after problem, but an extremely unexpected and shocking problem we found was the complete lack of accessibility for d/Deaf/hoh individuals! There is no LED light to show when you are getting a phone call or have a notification as well as no way to turn off the sound completely! These features are an absolute most for my Darling and anyone else who has any kind of hearing loss, so the fact that Nokia saw no problem in getting rid of these features was extremely disappointing. My Darling was having huge problems with knowing if someone was calling him or if he had a text message, not only because of these lacking features, but also because he kept accidentally turning on the sound without realising it. 

I was so frustrated that I tweeted about it on my personal twitter and I was less than impressed with Nokia's response to my Darling's very real problem:

I later reached out to them in a DM to ask if there was any way to work around these issues and asking them to please put the accessibility back on their future phones, but I did not get a response back, so that left me to believe that there was no real concern for this huge problem. 

Despite all this, my Darling was determined to use his new phone and to see if it was still a good phone, so he used it for five months to test it out. I'm guessing you know how this ended: he was very unhappy with the phone, partially to do with the camera, but mostly due to the lack of accessibility. He complained constantly of accidentally turning his ringtone on either a little or at full volume, unknowingly watching youtube and facebook videos with very loud sound on and his prayer app blasting the adhan everyday with no way for him to know or prevent these things from happening. If I or anyone called him, unless he had his phone physically on him, there was no way from him to know he was getting a call and even then, the vibrating setting was sometimes accidentally turned off and he was missing call after call and getting more frustrated each time. 

Of course, he also complained of the camera and told me that it was very difficult for him when he would call people on video chat or vrs, as the picture quality was just horrible and made it very hard to understand what the other person was saying. He also disliked the overall blurriness and low-quality of the videos and photos, and although he tried to make due with it and be happy with what he had, in the end, he just couldn't overlook these things. 

The last straw for him was when he dropped his phone and the screen protector broke and since it's an unusual phone, he was unable to find a new protector for it. He ended up going and switching to a Samsung J7 to tide him over til I switch over to a new phone whenever that might be, because he said there was no way he could keep missing all his calls and messages. 

I, more than anyone, really wanted the 6.1 Plus to work out and be a good phone, but it became more than clear from the start that we had made a big mistake in buying it. I wish that I had better things to say about Nokia, but sadly, there is no way I can recommend a phone that leaves out d/Deaf/hoh individuals. I'll admit that the price wasn't too bad, but in this case (as is always the case, I'm afraid) you definitely get what you pay for.