Nokia has been on a roll recently, launching a slew of exciting smartphones one after another. However, it wasn’t too long ago when Nokia was tragically breathing it’s last at the hands of Microsoft before finally throwing in the towel. It was a big loss to the world because, for many, their first phone was a Nokia. Also, in developing countries like India, Nokia was truly a beloved company owing to their rugged dependability and ease of use. It can’t be said for other manufacturers, but still, now a majority of the people are using those old Nokia’s despite them being gone. Fortunately, Nokia was bought back by HMD global, a Finnish company situated at the home of Nokia.
Nokia has lost a lot of ground over the years that they were missing from the market but they have slowly started gaining ground from 2017. Nokia has an interesting line of smartphones to compete with the big guns now, but with the advent of the Chinese getting a stronghold at the middle and lower end budget segments, Nokia isn’t out of the deep waters yet. To survive the market now, one needs to make something really special, and that’s precisely what Nokia has been doing as of late. Their Nokia 8 is an outright success, and even the lower end models are seeing a great deal of success. And that brings us to another device in Nokia’s arsenal called the Nokia 7. This is an important release for Nokia because it is supposed to be a scaled-down version of another upcoming Nokia smartphone, the Nokia 9. So, let’s see what’s this teaser release has in store for us.
Design and Display:
Nokia 7 is an absolutely gorgeous device right out of the box. It is crafted out of 7000 series aluminium which acts as the frame for the Gorilla Glass 3 body. Like all Nokia’s, it has a very sturdy construction and feels really solid to hold. The Gorilla glass 3 construction also means that it won’t easily break or shatter during daily usage or during accidental drops. The device’s front has the usual Android capacitive buttons, and hence, the fingerprint sensor is moved to the back, which is a first for Nokia going by their current phone design line-up, and it makes the front of the device much cleaner. Nokia has also given the device a Nano coating which makes it splash resistant, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for waterproofing as it hasan onlyIP57 rating.
The device comes with a 5.2inch display with a 1080p IPS panel. The display covers nearly 74% of the body, which makes the overall footprint of the device much smaller. The 1080p panel on the 5.2inch display means that the Nokia 7 has an extremely sharp pixel density of 424, which is excellent by any standards.
Performance:
The Nokia 7 runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 which an 8 core SoC based on the 14mn FinFet manufacturing process. It is an alleged replacement for the last gen Snapdragon 625 which too was a great SoC. However, this chip doesn’t suit the Nokia 7’s price tag, because it competes directly at the sub 30k budget. The competition is really cut throat at the moment with Chinese brands gunning for the mid-tier markets, and while the SD 630 is fine as far as multi-tasking goes, you can find much more powerful SoC’s for around the same price. With that said multi-tasking shouldn’t pose an issue and the chip is reasonably good at gaming too, courtesy of the Adreno 508 and the humongous 6GB of RAM.
The 630’s upgrade has bought some unique features like integrated X12 modem, Qualcomm 642 DSP, Hybrid autofocus, Quick charge 4.0 support and so on to the mainstream segments.
Software:
Nokia has gracefully bundled the Nokia 7 with a stock version of Android 7.1.1. They have been playing the software department really subtle ever since their comeback, and we should thank Nokia for not falling into the trap of using custom skins to differentiate their devices. As a result, the whole experience feels fluid and RAM management is done exceptionally well thanks to stock android. There are the bundled Google Apps but there is no bloatware whatsoever. The only custom bit is the camera app which has been designed by Nokia themselves.
Camera and Storage:
While the rest of the smartphone manufacturers are busy with designing dual cameras for their smartphones, Nokia hasn’t bothered to give the Nokia 7 the dual camera treatment and instead uses a conventional single camera setup at the rear. The party piece, however, is the comeback of the Zeiss and Nokia partnership as the device uses Zeiss optics on top of the camera sensor.
The primary camera is rated at 16MP and has an aperture of f/1.8 with a pixel size of 1.12 microns. The image quality is good under decent lightning conditions but suffers under challenging lighting as it has no optical or electronic image stabilisation. The camera is also capable of capturing 4k videos and kudos to Nokia for that. The front of the Nokia 7 has a 5MP camera which again is a bit of a downer as compared to the competition. The good thing here is that it has a fairly wide aperture of f/2.0 and a pixel size 1.4 microns.
The Nokia 7 is also available with a capacity of 64GB which can be expanded with an SD card to 256GB.
Battery and Connectivity:
The Nokia 7’s battery is rated at 3000mAh with support for Qualcomm Quick Charge 4.0, and a fast charger is bundled along with the package.
On the connectivity front, the Nokia 7 is well rounded. It supports GSM/CDMA/EDVO/HSPA/LTE in network bands. It also has GPS with A-GPS, GLONASS and BDS, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/n/ac, NFC and Bluetooth 5.0 with A2DP support.
Final Word:
The expected Nokia 7 price in India is speculated to be around Rs.26990 if and when it launches. It should make for a tricky buy for the end customer because there are definitely better-equipped devices out there in the market and the brand image card doesn’t hold much significance now.
