Nokia 7.2 review: Nokia’s mid-range headliner

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Nokias smartphone output is unrelenting, and rather than take a well-earned break as the year draws to a close, its yet again cramming as many smartphones as it can possibly push into a t-shirt cannon, then firing it point-blank into the crowd.

READ NEXT: Best mid-range smartphones

In fact, Nokia somehow managed to squeeze a total of five new handsets into its short one-hour presentation at this years IFA press conference, so youd be forgiven for struggling to separate the wheat from the chaff if youre due an upgrade anytime soon.

Take a cursory glance at that list which includes a flip phone and you might spot the Nokia 7.2 buried between the budget and flagship bookends of the smartphone pricing scale. Ostensibly combining top-end attributes with cutthroat pricing, it looks like the 7.2 could be Nokias finest smartphone to date.

Nokia 7.2 review: What you need to know

Lets not get ahead of ourselves, though. The Nokia 7.2 is par for the course of what you should expect from the Finnish telecoms giant by this point, not that thats a bad thing. In the last two years weve seen some truly great-looking handsets make an appearance, and aside from a few stumbles along the way, most of these smartphones have garnered some form of recommendation.

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Aside from the design (which I’ll talk about later) the Nokia 7.2 isnt the flashiest of smartphones. It has a modest 6.3in Full HD screen, is powered by a relatively unassuming Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor and it uses 4GB of RAM with 64GB of expandable storage.

The main reason youre going to want to buy one, however, is for the lofty promises of its photographic capabilities. The Nokia 7.2 benefits from a Zeiss-branded 48-megapixel camera on the back, along with an 8-megapixel wide-angle camera and depth-sensing unit for fancy blurred-background portraits. A 20-megapixel camera sits on the front of the phone, embedded inside the teardrop notch.

Nokia 7.2 review: Price and competition

The Nokia 7.2 will cost you £299 in the UK, placing itself firmly in the middle ground between cost-cutting budget handsets and extravagant flagships. This area of the market is much more contested than its ever been, following the meteoric rise of mid-range handsets in recent months, so the Nokia 7.2 has plenty of rivals.

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The most notable is the Sony Xperia 10 with its elongated 21:9 screen. We didnt think it was the best phone at this price, though, with a poor battery life and underwhelming internal specifications. That screen might be lovely, but it simply isnt enough to justify the price.

If you dont mind spending a little bit more edging closer to the £400 mark then the Pixel 3a currently wears the mid-range crown. Theres no better camera for the money, and its software offering is just as refined as the Nokia 7.2s.

Of course, you often find much better value for money if you point your wallet towards Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi. If you really have your heart set on a Snapdragon 660-powered phone, for instance, then you can pick up a Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 for only £169.

Nokia 7.2 review: Design and key features

Straight off the bat, the Nokia 7.2 punches well above its featherweight pricing when it comes to looks. The front of the phone might be a bit boring, with a simple teardrop notch eating its way into the top of the generously sized screen, but flip the phone over and Im certain youll be just as impressed as I was when I pulled it from the box.

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The frosted Gorilla Glass-coated rear which can be picked up in Cyan, Charcoal or Ice shimmers nicely in the sun, and its not as susceptible to fingerprints as the glossy finish on last years phone. The slightly curved edges with softly rounded corners are an equally nice touch, too.

It looks fantastic, and its all part of Nokias new approach of combining (in its own words) Nordic design elements with practical technology. The 7.2 is manufactured using a polymer composite that, according to Nokia, is twice as strong as polycarbonate and half the weight of aluminium.

Elsewhere, Nokia has shifted the layout of the rear-mounted cameras, moving them into a circular arrangement that looks quite similar to Motorolas own mid-range handsets. Its certainly a neat look, even if the camera housing protrudes quite a bit from the rest of the phone.

Of course, its other physical attributes are all accounted for theres a volume rocker and power button on the right edge, with a USB Type-C port and a solitary speaker grill sensibly placed on the bottom. Mercifully, Nokia hasnt followed the trend of removing the 3.5mm headphone jack either. Youll find it on the top edge.

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A somewhat irritating trend that Nokia has decided to follow, however, is the inclusion of a dedicated Google Assistant button next to the dual-SIM tray on the left side. In my time reviewing smartphones with Googles digital butler baked-in, I havent ever needed to use this button only ever pressing it accidentally. Guess what? The same applies here.

Nokia 7.2 review: Display

The Nokia 7.2 benefits from the same size screen as the £869 Galaxy Note 10 thats 6.3in from corner to corner if you didnt already know and this phone is also FHD+ in resolution (2,220 x 1,080), with an impressive 96% screen-to-body ratio.

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Now that Ive had the opportunity to set our colour calibrator loose on a review unit, Its clear that this screen is rather good for a phone this cheap. I found that it covered 99.7% of the sRGB colour gamut, with an average Delta E of 2.13. In laymans terms, that means colour performance is as good as you can expect from a phone at this price, with only a few issues of oversaturation in some dark red tones.

Brightness isnt bad either, with a measured peak luminance of 504cd/m2, which is slightly ahead of the Redmi Note 7s 467cd/m2, though a long way behind the dazzling 766cd/m2 of the iPhone 11 Pro. Of course, the Nokia 7.2 is still fine for outdoor use, and the high contrast ratio of 1,416:1 helps boost readability too.

Nokia 7.2 review: Performance and battery life

The Nokia 7.2 is powered by the ageing Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor, with eight cores clocked at up to 2.2GHz and an Adreno 512 GPU for graphics processing. Nokias newest mid-ranger also uses 4GB of RAM for multitasking, with 64GB of internal storage expandable up to a further 512GB via the phones microSD card slot.

We last saw this 2017 chipset powering the Nokia 7 Plus, so its getting a little long in the tooth, yet performance is actually better than most other phones in this price bracket. According to the Geekbench 4 benchmark, the Nokia 7.2 outperforms its predecessor by roughly 17% in multi-core-processing and 19% in single-core.

Gaming performance is equally rapid, producing an average frame rate of 20fps in the GFXBench Manhattan 3.0 on-screen test. That might not match those silky-smooth gaming experiences you typically get with more expensive flagships, but the Nokia 7.2 managed to hold its own when playing the likes of Call of Duty Mobile and Mario Kart Tour.

Sadly, while the Nokia 7.2 clearly beats its forebear when it comes to performance, it fails to make any notable improvements on its predecessors terrible battery life. In fact, it feels like a terrible case of deja vu here, with the Nokia 7.2 only managing to achieve a total of 10hrs 25mins in our standardised video rundown test.

Lets not understate how poor this result really is, especially as more power-hungry smartphones are regularly exceeding 20 hours under the same conditions. Youll be topping up the Nokia 7.2s 3,500mAh battery more often than most, so a power bank is an essential companion in this case.

Nokia 7.2 review: Camera

Finally, lets move on to the subject of cameras, which are undoubtedly the Nokia 7.2s raison d’être. Nokia made a big fuss about its photographic capabilities at the big unveiling, particularly emphasising that its finally bringing Sonys 48-megapixel (f/1.8) sensor to the mid-range market.

However, weve seen some iffy results from this camera in the past, most notably with the OnePlus 7 Pro and its watercolour-like images, so I quietly had my reservations before receiving the phone for review.

These initial reservations, as it turns out, are entirely warranted. The Nokia 7.2s 48MP shooting mode which isnt on by default and you have to enable in the settings isnt great; it seems to capture washed-out images that are lacking in any discernible detail. Even if youre outdoors with plenty of light, images look soft and objects lack definition. You can see this in my test images, where houses seem to merge with the taller buildings behind them:

Youre better off sticking with the default 12MP shooting mode. Its miles better and even manages to take almost as good snaps as the Pixel 3a in some instances, which costs £100 more. Theres plenty of intricate detail, even on a gloomy autumn afternoon in London, and the HDR mode works well, equalising bright and dark areas without altering the colour rendition.

With this being a 2019 phone, this isnt the only camera we have to work with. The 48-megapixel camera is backed by a further two sensors; one a 118-degree wide-angle lens, and the other is a depth sensor for blurred background portraits. Nokia is particularly impressed with the 7.2s portrait capabilities, allowing you to adjust bokeh levels (essentially how blurred the background is) on the fly, or even after youve snapped your shot. Its certainly not the best portrait mode Ive used outlines look unnaturally soft and blend into the background but the results are pretty good for the price.

The Nokia 7.2 is also supposed to be very good at capturing detail-rich pictures in low-light, thanks to some fancy HDR algorithms and an image fusion tech, which essentially takes multiple images and combines them when you press the shutter. I feel like Im repeating myself here, but low-light pictures arent as good as those from the Pixels terrific Night Sight mode, although the Nokia 7.2 did do a decent job at brightening up shots.

Switch over to video, and the shooting modes are surprisingly limited. You can only shoot in Full HD or 4K at 30fps with the Nokia 7.2; theres no fancy 60fps recording, and the footage isnt stabilised, either. The quality is fine enough, but it has difficulty with automatic exposure.

Nokia 7.2 review: Verdict

Though I sang its praises at the unveiling, my time with the Nokia 7.2 has changed my mind. Its now abundantly clear that the offering is a bit of a mixed bag. It excels in many areas, including design, performance and display quality. Yet the battery life issues are a serious threat to any potential recommendation.

But perhaps most of all, Im sorely disappointed with the camera. Its good, and a decent enough offering for the price, but it doesnt manage to live up to Nokias lofty promises. The Nokia 7.2 just about scrapes by through combining top-shelf features with a price that wont empty lighter wallets, but some of those features arent nearly as good as Id hoped.

Written by

Nathan Spendelow

Deputy editor at Expert Reviews, Nathan joined the website back in 2016. Kicking off his journalism career as a laptop reviewer, he swiftly became Expert Reviews' smartphone expert, testing and reviewing hundreds of handsets over the years. Nathan is an NCTJ-accredited journalist and regularly attends key industry events and product launches around the world, including the MWC and IFA trade shows.

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