- (Michael) For the past few months
the smart phones grabbing headlines
have been the ones with a comma in their price tags.
The ones for folks who are cool to drop forty bucks a month
for two years to snag the latest and greatest.
This is not that.
This is a smart phone for people who want to spend less
but don't want to feel like they've spent less,
HMD Global calls it "the king of the mid-range."
It also calls it the Nokia 7.1.
(music)
This isn't the first Nokia from HMD Global to hit the US.
But it's the first one you might actually care about.
Because, while the Nokia 6 was a tank,
built like a brick
(up beat music) house.
The 7.1 looks like part of a piano
or a fancy bar of soap in a hotel you cannot afford.
Naturally, you don't have to look far to see
where HMD saved some coin.
The gorilla glass 3 is only on the front,
while the back makes due with hardened glass.
The metal is aluminum
rather than something like stainless steel,
and the HD display is bracketed by the dreaded duo
of notch and big chin.
But damn if the rest of it ain't appealing.
Glossed steel or midnight blue colorways,
chamfered edges with anodized aluminum trim,
and the best tattoo you can find on a phone,
in my opinion.
No, not the Nokia logo,
though it does make my heart fuzzy.
But the Android One stamp.
This means that you're not buying an off-the-shelf
mid-range phone from your carrier,
with a bunch of preloaded cruft,
Bejeweled 8, McAfee Defender, get out of here.
Instead, you're getting pure, clean Android.
It's 8.1 today,
but Android Pie will hit it by the end of November,
and you'll keep getting updates for two years.
I spent a solid afternoon with the Nokia 7.1,
and the only place I found the experience really diverges
from stock Android is the camera.
This makes sense because the old Nokia
built pretty much the best camera phones of 2012 to 2015.
And HMD Global has resurrected the intuitive interface
from those days,
as well as the partnership with Carl Zeiss.
It's also great at some new features like Bothie,
which fires up both front and back cameras at the same time
so you can host a live stream
or share a photo of a nice scene
and your stupid face reacting to it.
See figure 1.
- Ah is that the Friends building?
No it's not at all.
But this is a Bothie.
- Bothies are improved here
in that you can now adjust the size of each frame,
and for stills you can position one shot at a time
to make things a little easier.
I'm told the review phone I shot these on,
by the way, was running near final software,
so expect your results to look pretty much like this.
Still, hold off for the proper review
a little bit down the road,
so I have time to test things like
the endurance of the battery,
the speed of the USBC charger,
and the displays ability to upscale old SD content to HDR10.
I have weirdly specific skill for this kind of thing.
I'm quite looking forward to this,
if you can't tell.
I mean I love my $1000 phones,
but again, I'm not expecting miracles from this camera,
but I do want to see what $349 gets you
when you buy a Nokia phone in 2018.
The 7.1 will be sold unlocked
for use on GSM carriers in the States,
with pre-orders open October 5.
It starts shipping from Amazon, BestBuy, and B&H
on October 28.
And it will be in select BestBuy bring and mortar stores
on November 4.
Subscribe to theMrMobile on YouTube
so you don't miss that full review
and follow the same handle on Instagram,
so you don't miss some dope Bothie broadcasts.
Until next time,
thanks for watching.
And stay mobile, my friends.
(music)