Nokia 7.2 Android Smartphone Review

Nokia 7.2 Android Smartphone Review

The Nokia 7.2 is closer to the entry-level end of the smartphone pool, which is actually saying a lot considering its feature set. At just over $300 from stores like Wal-Mart and newegg.com, you may find your needs met by the phone which puts the "ok" in Nokia.

 I'll explain it (upbeat music). Right now the most important thing you need to know about the Nokia 7.2 is that it is an Android One phone. If you don't know what that means, you're going to get an Android phone which is guaranteed to receive at least two years of updates to the Android operating system, which ensures you have the latest features and security improvements during that course of time. This also means you're not gonna get a bunch of carrier or manufacturer bloatware, so you'll be getting as close to the stock, pure Google Android experience as possible. Besides being a Pixel phone. The Nokia 7.2 ships with Android 9.0 Pie but the official timeline for it to be updated to Android 10 is sometime in the first quarter of 2020. We'll see. So, now that you understand what makes this an Android One device, let's take a look at the hardware and see if that helps you decide if it's the one for you.

 I'm reviewing the charcoal variant of the phone, which is also available in cyan, green and ice. The phone is wrapped in Gorilla Glass 2.5D, which isn't the high suspect for Gorilla Glass, but it's okay. You'll get a 6.3 inch full HD plus LCD display, that's 1080x2280 pixels, which is this tall 16x9 aspect ratio. It does support HDR 10 and I have to say, that this is not a bad looking display at all. The phone is available with either four or six gigabytes of RAM. My version is the one with 128 gigabytes of internal storage, and six gigabytes of RAM. The volume rocker and power button are on the right side of the phone. One of the design elements on the phone I enjoyed was that the power button doubles as a notification LED. It pulses and glows white when you have new notifications, but if you aren't feeling that, you can turn it off in the settings. On the left side of the phone, you'll get a micro SDXC slot, and depending on what you buy, you'll have either a single or dual SIM slot. Below that is the Google Assistant button, which I turned off as I always do, because I have a tend encrypt activate it by accident often. Top of the phone, you'll find a microphone and 3.5-millimetre headphone jack. Bottom of the phone, you'll find a mic, a USB-C charge port and the speakers. The phone comes equipped with a 35 hundred milliamp-hour battery, which Nokia says you should get two days out of, but I didn't find that to be true for me. With their adaptive battery technology, your battery life should get better over time, but initially, my results were just mediocre with me hitting about 20%left at the end of my days, which should be obviously a lot higher if you're gonna get two days out of it. 

Let's talk about these cameras next. The front of the phone is where you'll find a 20-megapixel quad pixel camera, which takes some pretty solid portrait and your standard selfies. Portrait modes can produce some very nice selfies, with beauty mode activated. But that software-based background blur can be aggressive at times. As you can see in some of these photos around my beard, and the sides of my forehead where the light blooms where it hits. In addition to that, you get a pro model on the front camera, which is something you don't see on many phones. And something I am a big fan of. You will also have some options to choose from in that front-facing camera, which will affect how background lighting looks as it's blurred out. I played with this in a few different environments and I found that unless you have very specific lighting, this isn't gonna be a feature which you'll probably use all that often. The back of the phone, you're gonna get Zees Optics for the 48-megapixel wide-angle lens, and an 8-megapixel ultra-wide lens. Additionally, you'll have a 5-megapixel depth sensor lens for effects. The images from the 48-megapixel lens produce photos with solid colour reproduction. But in low light, they can be a bit noisy, but the overall noise I experienced with the camera, is persistent there. The interesting difference found in the photos in terms of noise was that the use of portrait mode seemed to produce deeper blacks with less noise in low light conditions. You lose some image sharpness by utilizing portrait mode, but as you can see, in these image comparisons, you will notice the deeper blacks of the bars, while also seeing that the lettering in the signs is not as sharp. Overall, the camera's produce images which I think most people will be happy with. If you are a photographer looking for a solid point and shoot, you're probably not looking here anyway. If there's anything overtly negative to point out about the camera, it's that it actually has noticeable lag as you move through the different modes and it isn't long, but it isn't instant like some competitors. (Easy listening music) The software experience with the Nokia 7.2 is actually better than okay. 

The fingerprint sensor around back, it worked reliably and consistently, and the face unlocks functionality was fast and reliable as well. Though the phone uses the Snapdragon 660 chipset with Adreno 512 graphics processing, moving between screens and animations are smooth and fast. As a reviewer, I get to play with a lot of phones. Many of the high-end flagship models, so using this phone you do notice that it isn't quite as fast as some costing hundreds more, but we also have to remember, I think that the average user doesn't have as many phones go through their hands. And a phone like this, which may seem slower than others, still moves at a clip fast enough that you aren't going to be waiting for apps to launch. It isn't instant, but it isn’t 56k dial-up either. You've got mail! The overall interface uses a card-based design language. This is an Android One device after all. So swiping from the bottom to the top of the navigation bar, the dot will open up the app drawer when you're on the home screen. And going only a quarter of the way up brings you to the app switcher, which also shows your five recently launched apps on the bottom of the screen. Moving between apps in the app switcher is lightning fast. Pressing the home button takes you back to the home screen.

 Swiping left to right also switches you between apps with wonderful quickness. This phone does not have rise to wait but does have tap to wait, which I found to be hit or miss. I'll chock that more up to muscle memory on my part than anything because these taps to wait for phones have a rhythm to them. And it could just be me getting used to the cadence, which will wait for the phone consistently. When getting into the notification, shade options, and the menu options, you'll find that there is not a whole lot to look at. Some phones allow you to customize everything to the nth degree, but you're not really going to see that with this phone. With the Nokia 7.2. I don't think that's a negative thought. Some folks don't want to spend all their time playing with icon shapes and colours and that's okay. One oddity in the menu with this phone though, and this is, you see this in a lot of Android One stock, close to stock Android phones is when you switch to dark mode, the menu stays white. Notifications, the shade goes dark automatically but that's it. When in the display settings, it allows you to change the theme to the "dark theme", emphasis on the word "theme". Shouldn't that mean that everything else on the system level is affected? Nope! Want dark mode in your messages app? You have to enable it. Phone dialer. Enable it. Chrome. Enable it. And therein lies the disconnect. This is an Android One phone, but it is still a Nokia device

So, some system apps follow super changes while others which seem like system apps, due to the lack of bloatware and Nokia OS enhancements, well, those others may seem like system apps, but they're Google apps. And you'll have to go into each one, one by one, and turn on dark mode. (upbeat music playing softly) Okay, okay! Maybe not. Maybe not. So, "OK" is in the middle of "Nokia" and that kinda says it all for this device. It's pretty much stock Android with no user interface enhancements. And for those who don't want to spend their lives customizing their phone, that's "OK". Photos overall are "OK". Battery life, for me, it so far has been "OK". But at around $300, your bank account will be "OK" after you buy this phone. Instead of nagging you for spending money, you didn't really have, on a phone with 300 features you aren't really going to use. Okay?  Thank You. 😊😊😊😊