While seeing the landscape of competing for smartphone brands, one couldn’t forget the HMD brand Nokia. The company has managed to pull the name out from ashes and revived it while keeping its key ingredients that are true to a Nokia. The company’s latest offering called the Nokia 7.2 takes one classic stand at the so-called camera-centric smartphone and hopes to dial it a notch further.
While the Nokia 7.2 smartphone with its price tag of ₹18,599 seems to be a bit on the steeper side, a stylish body and a bloatware-free UI makes it interesting from a reviewer standpoint. So does this smartphone fair well to justify this price point, let’s find out!
Design
The Nokia 7.2 takes a distinctive approach towards design, as the body is quite appealing to look at. The iconic design flair makes it stand out, and the colour seems to pop right off the back. In regards to fit and feel the smartphone is unlike anything, we have come across in a lot of time.
The one-off design is made up of polycarbonate design, but it’s not felt until you go through the design spec sheet. The smooth rounded corners and the matte finish rear panel makes it ergonomic and agile.
Back also houses the reliable fingerprint sensor, which felt a lot improved in regards to its response and accuracy. This setup is complemented by a camera unit paced near the rear quarter panel on the back.
The button placement is exciting due to a notification light that is integrated right inside the power button assembly. This LED notably glows when you receive a notification or a call. Besides its useful stand, this touch does add a bit of flair that draws quite an attention from the crowd. Additionally, there is an extra button that pulls up the Google Assistant on the device right when you need it.
Display
The smartphone has a 6.3-inch IPS LCD that is well proportioned due to its comfortable aspect ratio. It’s not a very crispy display but works well for watching content. The added benefit of HDR10 and Nokia’s PureDisplay Technology makes the content scale-up in real-time. The dewdrop notch doesn’t seem to intrude beyond a slight chin on top. There is a dedicated Night Light mode that turns the colour to an amber hue to prevent sleep disruption as much as possible. Overall, we like the screen quality and were amazed at the prospect of watching shows and movies on this beautiful screen.
Performance
The smartphone is powered by the Qualcomm Mid-range Snapdragon 660 chipset which as we know, has finished its lifecycle. Despite its consistent performance levels, the processor doesn’t seem to manage a right balance between battery optimisation, raw gaming performance and outright multitasking ability.
On the plus side, this chip is tried and tested for smooth and stutter-free experience in sliding across the user interface and performing light tasks.
Throughout our testing, the smartphone handled all the apps running in the background without a hitch and coped quite well to keep battery usage in check. Games ran smoothly at a medium setting and were quite playable due to its consistent 30fps.
The near-stock UI was a great experience, and with a promised upgrade to Android 10, we hope Nokia would keep up this point in check.
Camera
The camera of the Nokia 7.2 takes centre stage with its impressive-sounding triple-camera system of 48-megapixel primary sensor, an 8-megapixel ultrawide, and a 5-megapixel depth sensor.
This setup accounts for some good-looking shots in daylight conditions, where the camera managed to click great looking zoom shots and portrait images. The colour in the shots taken was natural and a mix of overpowered terms.
Interestingly enough we found out that, each image we took had a varied degree of saturation level, despite the same settings. After much anticipation, we pinned this problem down to the defective unit that we got for testing.
The ultrawide mode does capture a lot of objects with its large field of view but fails to capture the intricate details that were apparent on the zooming. This resulted in shots with grainy edges and washed-out colours which were not up to standards.
The Night mode and AI assist does smoothen the natural blemishes that retort with low lighting conditions but fails to detect the edges or object due to its high latency.
The 20MP selfie camera on the front takes mediocre shots where its shady looking filters does do much to help it either. Considering the competition, we felt the Nokia 7.2 has some respectable spec sheet, but that doesn’t translate into real-world camera quality. For this, we hope Nokia would work on an update to fix these issues.
Battery life
The smartphone comes with a respectable 3500mAh battery which is more than adequate to power through an entire day’s worth of use. Despite Nokia’s claim of two days’ worth of use, we found out the device to barely last a full day with our average consumption of social media apps and some gaming session.
Even 15 minutes of Netflix streaming with brightness set at 75% was able to chop off 5% of battery life, which does prove out point. On the upside the device packs a Qualcomm Quick Charge support, that can charge the device from 0% to 100% in under two hours.
Gizmo Verdict
Wrapping up this review, the one thing we noticed is that despite its shortcomings, the Nokia 7.2 isn’t the worst smartphone of all. The smartphone has excellent built quality, a high screen, near-stock UI and a capable chipset to back it up. If Nokia had offered this device at a price point of sub ₹15K, this would be an offer that would be hard to resist. So if these features resonate with your being, please take a look at this smartphone.
