Nokia announced two new mid-range smartphones today, the Nokia 6.2 and Nokia 7.2, and it’s a departure from last year’s welcomed solo outing. 2018’s Nokia 7.1 was very nearly an ideal mid-range smartphone. It had a slick, yet understated design, ran a clean version of Android, and featured better cameras than you’d expect for the price (and it even had a headphone jack). The only thing that really held it back was mediocre battery life.
Editor’s Note: All of the Nokia phones announced at IFA will be coming to Australia! We’re still waiting on pricing and availability, though – Tegan.
But for the 2019 refresh of its mid-range line, Nokia is getting tricky by turning one phone into two with the new Nokia 6.2 and Nokia 7.2. From the outside, both phones look nearly identical, sharing the same die-cast aluminium and glass sandwich design, 6.3-inch Full HD display with a teardrop notch, and triple rear camera module. The only things that hint at the 7.2’s added sophistication are its signature cyan green paint job and a little Zeiss logo between its rear cams.
That’s because while the Nokia 6.2 sports a 16MP main sensor along with an 8MP wide-angle lens and 5MP depth sensor, the Nokia 7.2 comes with a 48MP main camera and special Zeiss optics. This allows the Nokia 7.2 to switch between shooting full 48MP photos when you want max resolution, or pixel-binned 12MP shots in low-light environments when you might need some additional light sensitivity.
And with its Zeiss lenses, the Nokia 7.2 also offers three exclusive bokeh modes you don’t get on the 6.2 including Zeiss Modern, Zeiss Swirl, and Zeiss Smooth. On top of all that, the 7.2 comes with an AI photo mode that can take between eight and 20 pictures depending on conditions, which the phone uses to stack multiple exposures together to create a higher quality final composite.
Elsewhere, both the 6.2 and 7.2 feature Nokia’s PureDisplay tech that uses a dedicated Pixelworks processor to automatically convert standard-def content into HDR, aided by a screen with a max brightness of around 500 nits.
And while it’s not super exciting, it’s nice to see that Nokia addressed the battery life concerns from its previous mid-range phone with new 3,500 mAh batteries for both the Nokia 6.2 and Nokia 7.2, which are 15 per cent larger than 3,060 mAh battery we got on the Nokia 7.1.
As for the rest of their specs, the Nokia 6.2 comes with a Snapdragon 636 chip, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage (plus a microSD card slot), while the 7.2 gets bumped up to a Snapdragon 660 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of base storage. And while Samsung may have axed the headphone jack on the new Note 10, both the 6.2 and 7.2 still feature handy 3.5mm audio ports.
The Nokia 6.2 is expected to arrive sometime in October in as an unlocked model for around 210 euros ($340), while the Nokia 7.2 will be available slightly earlier in late September for around 350 euros ($566).