Phone Upgrade - Motorola One Zoom?

The more I read, the more tempted I am by the Nokia 7.2. The price is certainly right, and the only thing I'd really lose bar a bit of performance and on-board storage is the 3x telephoto zoom lens from the Motorola One Zoom - but I'd end up with £100 more in my pocket, guaranteed two years of Android version updates and three years of security updates, and a three-year warranty.

The biggest complaint I found from any reviewer that had appeared to hold the thing for more than ten minutes at a trade show was that the camera uses an aggressive artificial sharpening filter that it doesn't really need, which sounds like the sort of thing that might get fixed in a future update.

 

It's software, I think - but none of the reviews I've found have tried a third-party app, so I 'unno. Also not sure if third party software would still let you make use of the extra sensors for stuff like depth-sensing and wide-angle shots - I remember that being a reason not to throw a third-party ROM onto the HTC 8 I used to have, 'cos it basically crippled the camera.

 

Happy without any kind of fast charging - I currently only charge my phone at night, hooked into a cheapy dual-port USB adapter that is probably 10W across both ports. So long as it can go from empty to full in six or so hours, it'd do me.

My current P9 has a slightly lower-capacity battery at 3Ah, 32GB of storage, and 3GB of RAM - so 64GB of storage and 4GB of RAM should be a nice little upgrade. According to GSM Arena, I'd be going from a Kirin 955 (4x 2.5GHz Cortex-A72 and 4x 1.8GHz Cortex-A53) to a SDM660 (4x 2.2GHz Kryo 260 and 4x 1.8GHz Kryo 260), so there's a possibility it might be slightly slower despite Kryo 260 'Gold' cores basically being tweaked Cortex-A73s - unless the extra gig of RAM and whatever under-the-hood improvements come with Android 9 compensate.

 

Just hit the go-button on the Nokia 7.2. Can't argue with the £100 saving over the Motorola Zoom, and this way I don't have to upgrade again for least another three years.

Looks like it's popular, though: Nokia's webshop was showing a 30th of October estimated shipping date all last week, but it's gone to the 7th of November now. I could have bought it with next-day delivery from Amazon or the Carphone Warehouse, but I wouldn't have got the warranty extension to three years. (Yes, I know my consumer rights cover it anyway, but it's always easier if you don't have to argue that point with the manufacturer...)

Looking forward to seeing what's new and shiny in Android 9 over my current Android 7 handset.

 

The Nokia 7.2 arrived yesterday. Initial impressions:

• Blimey, it's a tall bugger, innit?
• Fingerprint sensor seems a bit less forgiving about positioning than my old Huawei P9.
• Currently running the September 5th Android Security Update, no other updates yet available.
• The battery usage stats - where it shows you which applications have been using battery since the last full charge - worked yesterday and is borked today. Bunch of other people saying the same thing on Nokia/HMD devices going back a year, so... <shrug>
• The wide-angle camera's a bit... 90s webcam-ish. Fine for outdoor shots in good lighting, not so great for indoor stuff.
• The main camera is *super* aggressive about "improving" your pictures...
• ...but you can also get it to save a raw DNG at the same time as the processed JPEG. Sadly, Google Photos converts it to JPEG on upload, but I should be able to snag the originals off the microSD.

As an example, here is a quick image I snapped in 12MP "Photo" mode this morning:



and here's what Google Photos has done with the raw file:



The latter's definitely a bit closer to what things look like in the real world!

EDIT:
Well, that's odd. When I connect the phone to my PC and enable data transfer, I can browse the camera folder on the microSD... but there are no DNG files, only JPG. Yet Google Photos has found the files *somewhere*...

EDIT EDIT:
Oh, they get saved to the internal storage. Even though the camera's set to save to microSD. That's... unhelpful, that is. I guess I'll have to get into the habit of frequently clearing them out before the 64GB storage gets filled, despite having 128GB of microSD sat there doing knack-all.

 

Okay, now I've *found* the DNGs, this is what ufraw makes of the above - no editing bar allowing ufraw to automatically adjust the exposure and white balance:



And here's a quick edit to make it a bit more jazzy-like:



So, the camera's really quite good... if you don't mind having to edit the raw files yourself. I mean, seriously, look at the difference between that and the default shot.

 

Bonus points for this:



Yup, the camera app makes a "raw" folder under the Camera folder... then proceeds to just dump the DNG files directly in the Camera folder. Amaze.

 

Normal, maybe; annoying, definitely. This microSD can easily sustain 100MB/s write speeds, a 24MB RAW shouldn't be a challenge - and even if it were, it would be nice if it captured to the internal storage then moved it where I want it to be stored. Like, doesn't matter how slow the microSD is if you do that.

 

Could be worth a try, but I bet it makes Google Photos upload a *third* copy... (Processed JPG, DNG it randomly processes into a massive JPG for me, and the moved DNG it will process into another massive JPG for me - and none of those are the file I'd actually want. Hooray!)

 

Oh, I forgot about another annoyance which is apparently an Android 9 thing rather than a Nokia thing: the volume controls now adjust the media volume at all times, rather than the old behaviour of adjusting media volume during media playback and ringtone/alert volume at all other times. "It's great," the thinking seems to be, "because you can now adjust media volume before you start playing it" - which you could do before, by tapping a volume button once then sliding the media part of the three-tier slider that appears on-screen for ringtone, media, and alarms.

If you want to adjust ringtone volume under the new system? Tap a volume control, tap the Cog icon, wait for the full Settings window to appear, slide the Ring slider, press Back to hide the Settings window again. Oh, yeah, that's much smoother than the old way(!)

Also: The Nokia has a dedicated Google Assistant button at the side. It is impossible to remap this button to anything else. If you disable Google Assistant, all it does is bring up the "Enable Google Assistant" dialogue. I was hoping I might be able to get it to do something useful, like launch the camera or something. (I know you can double-tap the power button for that, but, c'mon, that's, like, twice the effort.)

 

Aaah, figured out why I can't get the DNG files from Google Photos: apparently if you set Google Photos to "high quality," it uploads a lossy JPEG regardless of what the original file was; you have to choose "Original" to get the actual DNG uploaded, and then you're limited to 10GB of storage before you have to pay.

I did have Google 1 on the Nokia, but that only upgrades me to 100GB for three months - so nuts to that. I'll just manually transfer the DNGs onto the desktop once a week or so.

 

Turns out Google Files has a "Transfer to SD card" option which highlights the DNGs - so I just need to run that every now and again. Handy!

What's less handy is that Nokia/HMD/Digital River/Whoever took the money on the 5th, refunded it yesterday(?), and has taken it again today - meaning I'm showing £249 still taken because the refund hasn't processed yet and another £249 pending and reserved out of my balance. Good job there's more than £500 in the account, I guess!

 

Day one: disabled Chrome and YouTube because I use two different apps.
Night one: Chrome and YouTube updates installed, re-enabled.
Day two: disabled Chrome and YouTube.
Night two: Chrome and YouTube updates installed, re-enabled.
Day three: disabled Chrome and YouTube after disabling notifications, reading somewhere that might work.
Night three: Chrome and YouTube updates installed, re-enabled.
Day four: disabled Chrome and YouTube, set Play Store to never automatically install updates.
Night four: Chrome and YouTube updates pending, both re-enabled on their stock versions.
Day five: this.

Fingers crossed it actually works!

 

You're not wrong - huzzah!

(I'd originally tried disabling via local shell, rather than ADB, but that didn't work.)