The iQoo Neo 7 5G debuted in India on Thursday, succeeding last year’s iQoo Neo 6. This smartphone features a larger AMOLED display 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 supports 120W fast charging and seems excellent value for money, with one exception in the camera department – this phone doesn’t have an ultra-wide camera.
On this week’s episode of Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast, host Siddharth Suvarna joins reviewer Pranav Hegde and lead reviewer Sheldon Pinto to talk about iQoo’s latest mid-range smartphone and how it compares to similarly priced models from Redmi and Realme truncates.
The iQoo Neo 7 5G features a larger 6.78-inch Full HD+ AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate. The company says the screen has a 360Hz touch frequency, and we found the brightness to be both is good for both indoor and outdoor use. It doesn’t have a curved screen and the company says the decision to add a flat screen was made to avoid spooky 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: Unparalleled performance, but is it an all-rounder?
While the handset appears to be aimed at gamers, it seems the company has had to do a few rounds to keep the phone’s price in check. The only major downside of the iQoo Neo 7 5G is the setup of the rear camera. Unlike its predecessor, this device does not have an ultra wide-angle camera. Instead, you get a 64MP primary camera with OIS and dual 2MP macro and depth sensors. Our tests show that the main camera is the only viable member of the trio. There’s a 16-megapixel selfie camera on the front, which smooths out the results, but thankfully this can be turned off.
The phone runs Android 13-based Funtouch OS 13, which means you get at least Android 15 and then security updates for a year – which is in line with many smartphones sold at this price point, with the exception of some Samsung A-series phones receive 3 years of operating system updates. The operating system seems much better this year, with no spam notifications from the default browser, bloatware that can be removed, 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 that the phone charges slower by default. While iQoo’s lab tests claim the phone can go from 1 percent to 100% charge in 25 minutes, we found that despite Mumbai’s warmer climate, it was slightly quicker when charging, going from 1 percent to a full in 23 minutes charge went.
The iQoo Neo 7 5G has some competition from phones launched by Redmi, Realme and other smartphones priced under Rs. 30,000 marks. 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 discuss whether you should consider them versus iQoo’s latest handset.
You can listen to all this and more in detail in our episode by hitting the play button at the top of the Spotify player.
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