Nokia 7 Plus hands-on: a phone to rely on

We're not going to go in deep details here, but we do have to say that the Nokia 7 Plus feels solid and well built – no surprises here, knowing that we're holding a metal-made handset. It isn't the prettiest phone we've ever had the chance to examine, but it has its character. The contrasting color accents add a sense of sophistication to an otherwise mid-range handset. 

Most of the phone's front side is occupied by a 6-inch, high-resolution display with bright, pretty colors. With the Nokia 7 Plus, the company joins the increasingly popular trend of 18:9 aspect ratio screens, maximizing the phone's display-to-body ratio. Since there's no room for a fingerprint scanner on the front of the device, that has been moved to the back, right below the protruding dual camera.

On the software side, the Nokia 7 Plus runs a clean and up-to-date version of Android. This is Android One we're dealing with, to be more specific – a clean version of Android with nothing dragging it down. Given the lack of any bloat on this phone, we're not surprised to see that the Nokia 7 Plus is fast and responsive, aided by a Snapdragon 660 chip on the inside, although browsing our website on Google Chrome did exhibit some slight lag. We do hope that was just the pre-production nature of our demo unit manifesting itself.

The dual camera at the back is a key selling factor for the Nokia 7 Plus. It combines a regular camera with a 2X zoom telephoto shooter, both with Zeiss optics used in their construction. Pro mode is available for those more experienced photographers, as well as Nokia's Bothie mode, letting you shoot photos and video with both the front and the rear cameras simultaneously.