iQoo Neo 7 5G Review: Should You Buy This Instead of the Realme 10 Pro+?

iQoo Neo 7 5G made its debut in India on Thursday as the successor to last year's iQoo Neo 6. This smartphone sports 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 offer great value for money, with one exception in the camera department — this phone doesn't feature an ultra-wide camera.

On this week's episode of Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast, host Siddharth Suvarna talks to Reviewer Pranav Hegde and Senior Reviewer Sheldon Pinto to talk about iQoo's newest midrange smartphone, and how it stacks up against similarly priced models from Redmi and Realme.

The iQoo Neo 7 5G sports 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 that the brightness is good for both indoor and outdoor use. It doesn't have a curved display, and the company says that the decision to include a flat display was taken to prevent ghost touches.

This is the first phone the country to feature the MediaTek Dimensity 8200 SoC under the hood, and it features up to 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and up to 512GB of onboard storage. This 4nm chip also comes with support for Sub-6GHz 5G 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 looks like the company had to cut a few corners to keep the phone's price in check. The only major downside with the iQoo Neo 7 5G is its rear camera setup. Unlike its predecessor, this handset does not feature an ultra-wide angle camera. Instead, you get a 64-megapixel primary camera with OIS, and two 2-megapixel macro and depth sensors. From our testing, the primary camera appears to be the only useful member of the trio. On the front, you get a 16-megapixel selfie camera that tends to smoothen out results, but thankfully, this can be turned off.

The phone runs on Android 13-based Funtouch OS 13 out-of-the-box, which means that you will get at least Android 15 and a year of security updates after that — this is in line with many smartphones sold at this price, with the exception of some Samsung A series phones, that get 3 years of OS updates. The operating system appears to be much better this year, without any spam-like notifications from the default browser, bloatware that can be uninstalled, and smooth animations and transitions.

iQoo Neo 7 5G First Impressions: Many Upgrades, One Downgrade

The iQoo Neo 7 5G also supports charging at 120W, with the included charging brick. However, we found that this is a feature that needs to be turned on, and the phone charges at a slower rate by default. While iQoo's lab testing claims the phone can be charged from 1 percent to 100% in 25 mins, we found it was slightly faster while charging despite Mumbai's warmer climate, going 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 the Rs. 30,000 mark. But while these phones are rivals of the iQoo Neo 7 in terms of price, it leads the category in terms of performance. We discuss these rivals on the episode, and talk about whether you should consider them over iQoo's newest handset.

You can listen to all of that in detail and more in our episode by hitting the play button on the Spotify player embedded above.

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