iQoo Neo 7 5G debuted in India on Thursday, succeeding last year’s iQoo Neo 6. This smartphone features a larger AMOLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate and is the first handset in India to be powered by MediaTek’s Dimensity 8200 SoC. The iQoo Neo 7 5G also offers 120W fast charging support and appears to represent excellent value for money, with one exception in the camera department – this phone doesn’t have an ultra-wide camera.
In this week’s episode of orbitalthe Gadgets 360 podcast, host Siddharth Suvarna talks to reviewer Pranav hedge and senior reviewers Sheldon Pinto to talk about iQoo’s latest mid-range smartphone and how it compares to similarly priced models from Redmi and Realme.
The iQoo Neo 7 5G has a larger 6.78-inch Full HD+ AMOLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. The company says the display has a 360Hz touch sampling rate, and we found the brightness to be decent for both the It is good for both indoor and outdoor use. It doesn’t have a curved display, and the company says the decision to include a flat display was made to prevent ghost touches.
This is the first phone in the country to have the MediaTek Dimensity 8200 SoC under the hood, and it comes with up to 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and up to 512GB of onboard storage. This 4nm chip also offers sub-6GHz 5G network support and is powerful enough to handle most modern games.
iQoo Neo 7 5G Review: Unmatched performance, but is it an all-rounder?
While the handset appears to be geared towards gamers, it looks like the company will have to cut a few corners to keep the phone’s price point in check. The only major downside of the iQoo Neo 7 5G is the setup of the rear camera. Unlike its predecessor, this handset doesn’t have an ultra-wide-angle camera. Instead, you get a 64MP primary camera with OIS and dual 2MP macro and depth sensors. From our testing, the main camera seems to be the only useful member of the trio. On the front you get a 16MP selfie camera that tends to smooth out results, but thankfully this can be turned off.
The phone runs Android 13-based Funtouch OS 13 out of the box, which means you’ll get at least Android 15 and a year of security updates afterwards – which is in line with many smartphones sold at this price point. except for some Samsung A-series phones, which will receive OS updates for 3 years. The OS seems to be much better this year, with no spam-like notifications from the default browser, bloatware that can be uninstalled, and smooth animations and transitions.
iQoo Neo 7 5G First impression: Many upgrades, one downgrade
The iQoo Neo 7 5G also supports 120W charging with the included charging brick. However, we found that this feature needs to be enabled and the phone charges slower by default. While iQoo’s lab tests claim the phone can charge from 1 per cent to 100% in 25 minutes, we found that despite Mumbai’s warmer climate it was slightly quicker when charging, going from 1 per cent to a full charge in 23 minutes became.
The iQoo Neo 7 5G has some competition from mobile phones coming from Redmi, Realme and other smartphones priced under Rs. 30,000. But while these phones are price competitors of the iQoo Neo 7, it leads the category in terms of performance. We discuss these rivals below, and whether you should consider them versus iQoo’s latest handset.
You can listen to all of this and more in our episode in detail by clicking the play button on the Spotify player embedded above.
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