HMD global has recently launched the Nokia 7.1 and we were pleased with the initial impressions.
It features a PureDisplay which is really bright. The phone feels great to hold and fits well in your palm. It is a great performer for that price point.
Hardware:
The Nokia 7.1 has been marketed with the PureDisplay which basically means that it is really bright. We tested it in sunlight and it was brighter than some of the expensive flagships out there. It was really comfortable to view in direct sunlight. It is also HDR10 compliant and features a SDR to HDR conversion which brings HDR quality to all your videos.
I really liked the physical dimensions of the phone. It is sleek, yet the the screen is big enough at 5.84 inches. It has a 19:9 aspect ratio so it gets even easier to hold despite the generous screen size. It did feel a bit slippery initially but did not actually end up slipping, perhaps given the fact that it is not huge and fits well in your hand.
The rear setup also look neat; the placement of the two cameras, the flash and the fingerprint sensor looks natural, though it’s protruding out a tad bit. The back of the phone looks really classy; though it attract smudges and fingerprints.
It does come with the 3.5mm headphone jack which I’m still personally a fan of. The speaker is really loud too and the sound output is more than enough for listening indoors. I did find the treble to be a bit on the higher side when listening with the default settings. Also, when listening to songs with higher bass, the phone couldn’t reproduce the bass that well.
When you pause a song, it doesn’t stop abruptly but slowly fades out which is a nice touch.
The camera is just brilliant and is an amazing performer especially when there is ample natural light. We’ve reviewed it in detail in the camera section below.
Under the hood:
The version we have has a 3Gb RAM and a 32Gb internal memory. I found this to be fast while using it for doing regular tasks, opening multiple apps at once etc. It performed without any difficulty. There is also a version which comes with 4Gb RAM and 64Gb internal memory. Both of them are expandable up to 400 Gb which is humongous for a phone in that range.
The battery capacity is 3060 mAh which is good enough and at par with phones in that category. The battery life is decent and lasts a day with moderate amount of usage.
When the battery goes below 15%, the phone shows a red bar on the top and bottom of the screen so there’s no way you’ll miss a low battery warning.
The phone ships with Android Oreo 8.1, but it’s upgradable and we didn’t wait a minute to upgrade it to Android Pie 9.
Since it runs pure Android, the experience is great; not having bloatware does help to keep the phone running smoothly.
Camera:
This is my favourite part of the phone, and exploring the camera of the Nokia 7.1 was a rollercoaster. There were a lot of things which took my by surprise – mostly in a good way, but some in a not so good way too.
Rear camera:
At the rear is a dual-camera setup. The primary camera is a 12 Mpxl shooter with an aperture of f/1.8, and the secondary one is a 5 Mpxl shooter with an aperture of f/2.4 which helps with the depth effect especially in the Live bokeh. You can quick launch the camera by pressing the power button twice in quick succession.
I clicked some shots in broad daylight and they were crisp and clear. The colours were fabulous too, and you would have absolutely no complains while shooting on the Nokia 7.1 when there is ample light.
it does perform pretty well even during low-light conditions and I would say it is one of the best in that price range.
Something which I noticed is that if you click on a darker area where you would like to focus on, and the area is not in the centre, it would struggle to adjust the exposure.
There is also an option called “Motion” which you can toggle between On and Off. This is similar to the live photo option on an iPhone that captures a few seconds of video before taking the picture. You can export this as a still, a video, or a Gif.
Now let’s talk about the Live bokeh (which has become pretty much standard on all phones these days, albeit by different names) on the Nokia 7.1. The good thing I like is that it does not zoom in when you switch to this mode like some phones. Also, it almost always detects the subject in the foreground correctly and blurs the background. If it does not, then you have the option to tap a subject so that it focuses on it. You can also choose the strength of the depth (bokeh) effect as per your liking, but only before you click it. It doesn’t have the feature of adjusting it later like some phones do. The live bokeh works well in low light conditions too and has negligible noise.
without bokeh 
with bokeh
Like most phones, when you shoot in the live bokeh mode, the main subject appears a tad bit smoothened out as compared to the regular mode, but nothing to really complain about. The file size of a photo in Live bokeh mode is approximately 7 Mb, whereas the regular one is about 4Mb.
The Nokia 7.1 also has a pro mode if you’d like to get more from the camera. Sadly, there were more things about the Pro mode which I did not like than the things I did. Perhaps one of the reasons might also be that the camera performs so well in the Auto mode that the Pro mode needs to be a real beast to impress you.
First and foremost, the thing that I absolutely detested about this mode is that it doesn’t show the intended colours accurately. There was a drastic difference between the preview and the actual photo. When I used a slower shutter speed, the photo came out more exposed than what the phone showed me, and vice versa.
The lowest that the shutter speed goes is just 4 seconds. A lot of phones out there have 8, 10, or even 30 seconds of shutter speed.
On the other hand, the highest shutter speed is just 1/500 seconds which just does not do the job when you’re shooting against the sunlight. The photos were over-exposed, however when I clicked the same picture in the auto mode and checked the exif data, the phone clicked it at a shutter speed of 1/11813 seconds. I found the pro-mode to be counter intuitive in this scenario.
As far as the video is concerned, the Nokia 7.1 can shoot videos in UHD 4k which is fantastic. When in video mode, you also get the option to live stream and can choose either Youtube or Facebook. The phone needs to be unlocked before opening the camera for this option to be enabled (and doesn’t open via quick launch if the phone is locked). Nokia has worked towards bringing spatial audio in mobile devices and this too has that technology called OZO, which activated during shooting videos and you can see a small pop-up informing you about it while shooting videos. You can read more about OZO audio here.
The Nokia 7.1 also has the slow motion mode, as well as the time-lapse. It was great to see that you can click still pictures while shooting in both of these modes. Sadly, you cannot adjust the speed of the video in either of the modes – neither before shooting, nor after – and the phone does it automatically. The good part though is that just like a regular video, even videos shot in these modes can be “stabilized” later using the in-built photos app.
Apart from the above modes, the rear camera also has other two shooting modes viz. “square” and “panorama”. Also, there is a button for launching google lens in all of the modes in the rear camera.
Front camera:
In general, I’m not a big fan of selfies and hence not much into front cameras, but the Nokia 7.1 did have a few cool tricks up its sleeve when it came to this.
You can shoot in pro mode even when using the front camera, but I don’t think a lot of us would actually use it since we’re usually in a bit of a hurry while clicking selfies.
A cool thing is that the front camera also features a live bokeh mode. There is a single camera in the front so the way it achieves this is by way of face detection. It keeps the face in focus and blurs the rest of the area. If it doesn’t detect a face, then of-course, the bokeh does not work.
The front camera can shoot videos in FHD 1080p, and can also take a time-lapse which might be of special interest to those doing make-up tutorials out there.
Since “filters” are so popular these days, the Nokia 7.1 has a few of them in-built and can be used with the front camera as well as the rear.
You can also create an animated emoji with the front camera and there’s also the option to change the lighting (something similar to white balance).
Bothie:
Nokia coined the term “bothie” (from Selfie) last year when it launched the Nokia 8 and I found this to be a really cool feature. You can use both cameras at once by pressing the icon which looks like a portrait and then clicking on “dual”. This launches both cameras in split screen views and you can increase / decrease the area of each by dragging the slider. At times, you might find that you’re at an awkward angle and cannot get the subject in front and back right at the same time, so Nokia has also added a feature called “twice shot” which you can toggle On / Off. When you do this, you can click one picture first, and the second one later which is practical during a lot of situations.
There is also the option of zooming in individually for both the cameras too.
You can shoot videos as well while using dual cameras and also go live which is a great feature.
The filters are available to use in this mode too, and once you use a face filter in this mode, it will apply a corresponding theme to the rear camera, and that really talks about the attention to detail that Nokia has given to its features.
In the dual camera mode, you can also use PiP (Picture-in-Picture), where the front camera takes up just a small area of the screen and the majority is the rear camera.
Miscellaneous:
What makes it distinctly Nokia is the Support app which we also spoke about in our review of the Nokia 1 (where it was called Nokia Care). Apart from all the features in that one, this additionally also has access to community forums, app highlights (recommended apps), and has a much cooler look. The device monitor is improved too and gives you information like the signal strength.
What I found a bit weird is that when I did not use the phone for long periods and tried to unlock it with my fingerprint, it couldn’t, and asked for the pattern to be entered. It might be a tad bit annoying but perhaps Nokia has done it for security reasons.
For those of you who like your world in black and white, there is also a “Greyscale” option which is available as a toggle from the quick settings bar where the display turns into monochrome .
The geekbench score for this one is as follows. I found it to be a bit low initially, but given the price point, it is pretty much acceptable.
What I disliked about the phone is that it has a notch. It is a bit unnerving initially but eventually you get used to it.
Bonus section:
While updating from Android Oreo to Pie, I had kept the phone in DND mode. The way both of these versions handle DND mode differs slightly, and after updating, it gave me a notification saying that “Do Not Disturb has changed”, which was quite nifty.
Perhaps one of the most practical features of Android Pie for me was the in-app rotation where you can have the auto-rotate on your phone to be switched off, but when you’re using a particular app and tilt the phone horizontally, a small button pops-up in the bar below pressing which you can choose to rotate the display. This comes in handy when you want to rotate only certain apps.
Wrap-Up:
Overall, the Nokia 7.1 is a great phone. My primary reason to like the latest Nokia phones is that they run Android One (pure Android). This phone also has a screen that is really bright during sunlight. The battery is decent and the camera is just fantastic. Given the price point of about AED 1000, I think it offers a good bang for your buck.
