Nokia XL in 2021 - Android in a Lumia Body!

hey what's up fellas i'm relations female fan steve malicious here and here on this channel we cover a lot of windows devices nokia lumias to be specific and in every one of those videos there's in the comment section people saying hey gee i wish more people did this today continued the design language of the lumias forward into the 2020s well if they did that undoubtedly the operating system they'd be doing was some skin of android so back in 2014 that's exactly what they tried the nokia xl running android with a very windows mobile feel skin running on top we're going to unbox one we're going to take a look at it we're gonna see if it's still useful today on this edition of stevalicious tech welcome back and as always thank you so much to all the new subscribers inching that much closer to 2900 as of the taping of this video if you've been here for a little bit if you're enjoying the content go ahead and tussle that subscribe button it certainly means a lot to me so the nokia xl featured mostly in emerging markets it was a budget device so not the most powerful specs even for the time an s4 play snapdragon processor five inch lcd display clocking in at 480p four gigs of storage and a uh three fourths of a gig of ram so we're gonna keep the unboxing short because i'm gonna get to the actual os and the ui which is the interesting portion of this and partially why it's a cool idea and also partially why it fails this is the first time i didn't know this thing existed until not that long ago so this is my first time holding one of these and it seems pretty reliably new in box so i'm excited about that even though we can't even cut the box properly here see how we get into this see if that does it these nokia boxes were always fun back in the day little pull tabs okay and we're in of course i went with the brightest highlighter yellow possible that all the lumia colors that you've come to know and love so that's something that uh definitely is an advantage i went with the yellow only because i only had one yellow device and that's the 1020 lumia so i figured another one would not go amiss so oh interesting it's light it's lighter than the size would indicate there's the tab on the it's a single capacitive button it doesn't have the regular android navigation from what i understood but at least it is running jelly bean so while i know a lot of android apps these days require at least android 6 perhaps we have half a chance with jelly bean of getting some stuff to run the problem is going to be the fact that it didn't have the google play store so you had to get stuff through nokia and through microsoft in order to get stuff on here even though it was a android device interesting it's not like the regular plastic that you'd get on the 1020 kind of the harder plastic this is a soft touch plastic which is actually a nice feel to the device so micro usb for charging not a lot going on headphone jack power volume up and down that is it you got your speaker on the back your camera and your flash so this is most certainly dead so let's see what else is in the box we're gonna we're gonna cut in a moment and power it up and see what we can do with it we got some writing this is an international dual sim version so we're gonna have to deal with that oh that might be why it was so light we have our nokia battery so removable battery which is good and then a headphone pair headphones huh and a hundred dollar device back in the day don't even get that the 1200 and then the international charger so that's why we got the adapter in the box and dated august 2015 stamped nokia care all the rest of it so a nice new inbox example does it look touch we're gonna go ahead pop the battery in this thing we're gonna charge it up we're gonna cut here we're gonna get set up gonna put a sim in it and when we come back we're gonna see exactly what you can do with the nokia xl in 2021 don't go anywhere we're back i wish i could say i had more success getting this running we have yoda here we tried to use the force and it just isn't happening don't forget this was a budget device a low end budget device in 2014 so you can imagine how it's running today it is quite interesting though there are some design elements to the ui that we're going to take a look at right now to give you the feeling of what if what if this device were carried on what if the lumia design language hardware wise was extended into the 2020s with an android skin on top so it's a bizarre compromise of windows phone elements so you've got the one capacitive back button there's no home button but you also have some swipe gestures that you'd get with android so if you want to say you're on the lock screen here you want to unlock you go ahead and swipe a left and you're greeted with something that should be relatively familiar to windows phone users these could be live tiles essentially they're not but they could be so you could see what they were doing with the colorful simple clean ui which is quite nice on top of android no google play store which is incredibly limited especially now because there are some things that would run on here if only you could download them now some people on the web have said they're able to get whatsapp working and if you still have one of these if you're still using it text call and whatsapp probably is the extent of what you want to be doing because even typing out words is slow on this i don't blame the device it's an interesting device to have it's also terrifying to open up well i i unboxed it and i saw that there was a battery but it looked like a relatively unibody design when you look at it just look like a screen embedded in the plastic well you rip the screen out of the you rip this you basically take the polycarbonate shell off of the phone which is this put your battery your sim which is a 3g 2g sim maybe it's an international thing i was enabled maybe it's an att thing i wasn't able to get it activated and you've got your micro sd card which is quite nice because being there's only four gigs of internal storage so you can up that and then you basically put it back in this case it's essentially a case and then you could start using the device no problem now other things if you're a windows user windows phone user you notice this right the keyboard relatively familiar typing the only thing they changed which really threw me off is that when you're used to typing on a windows device you go to the lower left and you hit to go over to number pad they put a settings button here that you just hit that and you hold it and then you get settings for the keyboard instead of your number pads that took a minute to get used to but otherwise you have a lot of the same design elements that you'd get with a regular lumia phone so it is interesting it is something that i wish had a little bit more functionality it is something that i wish we'd get on newer devices but as far as i was under the impression that all right i love my lumia devices but windows phone's a little limiting so maybe something running jelly bean which the blackberry 10 essentially runs jelly bean and you're able to get whatsapp and some other functionality on top of that so i thought maybe this could be the same and i could carry it around have my bright yellow nokia lumia hardware on top of it not quite not quite unfortunately you're better off if you want to carry around that windows phone feel that hardware you're better off for the same price these are 100 bucks on ebay relatively new or refurbished you're better off getting a 930 and enjoying an oled display more powerful processor and all the rest of it and you're getting more functionality believe it or not through the apps the web apps on a windows phone than you are on this so i was able to get youtube sort of running which i won't do again because i don't hate myself but i you it comes with the internet explorer that's on it you don't want to use but thankfully it comes pre-packed with opera which you can sort of use so you could go to i was able to get i was able to log into instagram all right facebook and twitter wanted none of it but it was able to get in into instagram but you're not gonna want you're not gonna want to scroll for very long basically the idea here i went in thinking maybe it'd be cool to use maybe it'd still be usable a little bit and see what a differently designed ui would be for an android device on hardware that we all know and love but now it serves more like almost kind of a tease like a what if you know what if there were an xl5 what if we were way into them now and they had snapdragons and top of the line stuff instead of just the budget stuff that was in this one with powerful processors beautiful displays would this be something that would work today i think so you know there's going to be a video later in the week that i used uh an old a pixel the very first pixel that's going to be the next video and i don't care about the bezels i think we go crazy on the bezels your eyes don't go there you guys go on the screen and give people the choice i think this is a great design that has nostalgia for a lot of people and it's something that would still have a market today and if you made a windows device that's why i was kind of a little disappointed that microsoft went with the duo design as opposed to a surface phone that had kind of these design cues and features if they went with a lightly skinned watered-down simple ui something like this that we all enjoyed with the tiles and hardware it could be slab hardware at that point because the the selling point the competitive advantage is the software so if you had simple hardware slab hardware like this but you made a little fun you do the brushed aluminum aluminum but doing them not yellow hot pink red blue yeah make it fun you know all the microsoft colors whatever you want to do same thing for nokia i think it's a future of you know what if what could have been possible if this design language survived and like i said all the comments that we get a lot of people love these devices including myself i wish they were still completely viable to carry around or there was something that carried on that flavor but not really unfortunately so these are fun when i use one today no if you got one and you're using it let me know i'd be curious to hear from you how it's running for you what you're able to get working on it because it even typing was painfully slow on it but if you're still enjoying it if you still use it if you had one they had all the range of colors that you'd expect from a lumia device from a nokia device they had the yellow they had the orange the hot green the electric green they had the blue they had all the colors the fun colors that you could carry around interesting concept interesting idea didn't really nothing came of it which i think is is quite a shame but anyway if you made it this far like comment subscribe all that fun stuff until next time have that steve delicious day

Channel: StevealiciousTech

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Keywords: windows phone, windows 10 mobile, nokia xl review, nokia xl android version, nokia xl in 2021, windows phone in, windows phone in 2021, nokia lumia review 2021, windows 10 mobile 2021, x platforms, x platform, xplatform 2021, nokia xl youtube

Id: NmEaEtqlWTg

Length: 12min 30sec (750 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021