Nokia 7 Plus Review

Nokia has been out of the game for quite some time. This company was one of the biggest companies in the world, just a decade or two ago. But, what happened in the process is what actually threw Nokia out of any kind of smartphone market. In the past year or two, Nokia ditched their Microsoft phones in favor of more approachable Android phones that work relatively well. But, is Nokia really up to par with their old fame? I guess we’re going to find that out in our Nokia 7 Plus review, which is just below.

Design and Build Quality

It seems that everyone’s going crazy about 18:9 screens, so Nokia quenched our thirst for this feature. Before we talk about this display, we need to mention the overall design. Because of the display, you can pretty much guess what we’re talking about. Nokia weighs around 183 grams, which isn’t a small number by any means. In fact, it’s almost 200 grams and that’s a pretty heavy smartphone. On the other side, its thickness of 8mm is impressive since this phone packs a lot of mass.

The edges are slightly curved, although not that much. The back of the phone appears to be plastic, but a sturdy one, indeed. On the right side, we have a volume rocker and a power button, where on the upper side, we have a welcome 3.5mm port and on the bottom, there is a USB type C connector. The fingerprint sensor is located just below the dual cameras behind, which is normal. When it comes to the build quality itself, Nokia continued their trend from the past, making this phone one of the best in the price range.

Display

Nokia 7 Plus packs a 6-inch IPS display that comes with a resolution of 1080×2160 pixels. However, this screen is huge! I mean, 6 inches isn’t small by any means, even though we are dealing with a 2:1 screen. This makes this phone very tall, making it nearly impossible to use with a single hand, especially for people with smaller hands like me. The pixel density is around 403 ppi and that’s slightly lower than the most phones, due to the size of this screen. But, the great news is that we have Corning Gorilla Glass 3 – an amazing protection for your screen.

When it comes to the color reproduction and accuracy, Nokia 7 Plus does the job quite well. Since this is an IPS display, I expected the colors to be accurate and not oversaturated like on AMOLED displays. Still, I wish that Nokia 7 Plus had an AMOLED display, mostly because of the brightness, which can never be that good on IPS displays. Overall, this is a pretty nice display for a phone that costs around 500 USD. If you ask me, that’s on a cheaper side of the spectrum and you can still say it’s a cheap smartphone.

Camera

The camera, or should we say the DUAL camera on Nokia 7 Plus is both hit and miss. While we have this super dual camera with 24MP in total, it sounds impressive on the paper, but a little less impressive in the real life. However, let’s elaborate a bit. First of all, the pictures taken with this device are very good. I mean, you can’t expect a quality up to pair with Galaxy S9 or Huawei P20. Still, this is a decent camera. The low-light photos are quite good, while the daylight photos are saturated with colors, have a good dynamic range and overall quality.

On the other hand, we have to talk a bit about the video quality. While some say it’s great for the price tag, I can still say it’s debatable. Yes, we DO have 2160p video recording at 30 fps, but the 1080p videos are also capped at 30 fps. That’s quite a shame and I see that Nokia missed the chance to make this camera even better. For those who like to take selfies, the 16MP front camera will deliver that Insta-worthy selfie that we all want.

Performance

Performance-wise, Nokia 7 Plus can be categorized as a mid-range phone. When you see its Snapdragon 660 chipset, you’ll know why. We all know that Snapdragon 625 and 660 chipsets are very common in mid-range phones, so it’s not a surprise. However, it’s coupled with Adreno 512 GPU which delivers a solid blow. Much to our surprise, this phone can indeed give you a quality gaming experience. But, don’t expect your framerate to be that high.

For those who are worried about multitasking, Nokia comes with 4GB of RAM. It’s a standard in this price point, so nothing special here. The only thing I don’t like is the low internal memory of just 64GB. Luckily, we have the possibility to increase our space with a mircoSD card, up to 256GB. Overall, Nokia is great with its Android 8.0 OS and the performance is great for the given price.

Battery and Speaker

Under the hood, Nokia 7 Plus comes with a great Li-Ion battery that packs 3800 mAh of power. Since we have a quality screen and powerful hardware, the battery is quite impressive. It can provide more than 700 hours in standby mode and about 19 hours of talk time. For a heavy user, Nokia will probably last a whole day without charging.

What about the speaker? Well, the fun thing about this speaker is that it’s nothing new. It’s not like on Samsung J phones where the speaker was really bad. Here, we have a decent, strong, and quality sound that’s more than enough for everyday use.

Verdict

So, is Nokia 7 Plus really worth its price? Whether you like it or not, this phone represents the golden middle. I expected much higher price, but since Nokia isn’t that greedy, I’m glad you can get it for a relatively cheap price. The highlights of the phone are a solid hardware, good camera, amazing front camera and of course, Android 8.0, which is always a welcome addition. If you like to have a stock Android experience and still have a phone that can do things fast, Nokia 7 Plus is a great way to go.