iQoo Neo 7 5G made its debut in India on Thursday as the successor to last year’s iQoo Neo 6. This smartphone has a larger AMOLED display with 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 seems to be great 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 trajectorypodcast Gadgets 360, host Siddhartha Suvarna talk to reviewers Pranav Hegde 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 Neo7 5G features a larger 6.78-inch full-HD+ AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate. The company says the display has a touch sampling rate of 360Hz, and we found that brightness is good for both indoor and outdoor use. It doesn’t have a curved screen, and the company says that the decision to include a flat screen was made to prevent ghosting.
This is the country’s first phone with a MediaTek Dimensity 8200 SoC inside, and it has up to 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and up to 512GB of internal storage. This 4nm chip also supports 5G Sub-6GHz networks 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 aimed at gamers, it seems the company has had to cut some details to keep the phone’s price in check. The only major downside to the iQoo Neo 7 5G is the rear camera setup. Unlike its predecessor, this phone does not have an ultra-wide-angle camera. Instead, you get a 64-megapixel main camera with OIS and two 2-megapixel 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 16-megapixel selfie camera that tends to smooth out the results, but fortunately this can be turned off.
The phone runs on Funtouch OS 13 based on Android 13, which means you’ll get at least Android 15 and a year of security updates afterward — that’s in line with many smartphones sold at low prices. This price, excluding some Samsung A series phones, is updated with the operating system for 3 years. The OS seems to be much better this year, without any spam-like messages from the default browser, bloatware that can be uninstalled, and smooth animations and transitions.
First impressions of iQoo Neo 7 5G: Many upgrades, one downgrade
IQoo Neo 7 5G also supports charging at 120W, with the included charger. However, we found that this is a feature that needs to be enabled and that the phone charges at a slower rate by default. While iQoo’s lab test claims that the phone can be charged from 1 percent to 100% in 25 minutes, we found it to be a bit faster when charging despite Mumbai’s warmer climate, from 1 percent to fully charged in 23 minutes.
The IQoo Neo 7 5G has some competition from handsets launched by Redmi, Realme and other smartphones priced under Rs. 30,000 marks. But while these phones rival the iQoo Neo 7 in terms of price, it leads the category in terms of performance. We discuss these competitors in the episode and talk about whether you should consider them over iQoo’s latest handset.
You can listen to all that in detail and more in our episode by hitting the play button on the Spotify player embedded above.
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