Whenever you buy a new phone, you spend time not only installing your favourite smartphone apps, setting up the way it looks and feels, and wondering how to download the Betway sports betting app on Android. You also spend time disabling all the applications the smartphone maker (or the cellular service provider) is force-feeding you thanks to its various partnerships. Samsung phones, for example, were for a long time pre-loaded with apps like Flipboard, Facebook, and a few more, not to mention Microsoft’s various products that you either use or not – yet they still occupy space on the phone’s often limited internal storage with no way bar rooting to get rid of them. These apps are generally referred to as “bloatware” and it can drive some smartphone users nuts.
Smartphone makers have an alternative to consider, though, one that is finally useful for the user: Android One. It is a variant of the Android operating system released and maintained by Google itself, without any of the apps that manufacturers try to cram down their users’ throats. What makes Android One great (and increasingly popular with users) is that its updates are not handled by the manufacturers but by Google itself, thus significantly reducing the phones’ update cycles and keeping them running great and up-to-date.
Finnish smartphone maker HMD Global, the company behind the recently revived Nokia brand, seems eager to embrace Android One. Recently, it has released several handsets running this cleaner version of the world’s most popular operating system. And the results are great.
The Nokia 7 Plus is one of HMD’s mid-range smartphone models. It is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 660 SoC with 4×2.2 GHz Kryo 260 & 4×1.8 GHz Kryo 260 processor cores paired with an Adreno 512 GPU, 64GB of internal storage, 4GB of RAM, and all the features and amenities of a flagship phone from a couple of years ago. It also has Carl Zeiss optics in both its main (dual) and front cameras, ensuring amazing pictures, videos, and selfies for anyone using them. And it comes with Android 8 (Android One) out of the box, which is one of its main selling points making it stand out of the crowd of similarly priced handsets (it costs up to $500 or more, depending on the seller and the operator).
Android One offers the phone a clean and very responsive interface, offering all the obligatory Google apps – Maps, Photos, Duo, and Docs – and not much else. What makes it even more attractive that it will get security patches and upgrades long before the rest – with little to no customization needed for them to run, operating system updates will be rolled out among the first on Android One phones, in general.
And the Nokia 7 Plus is not the only handset HMD has decided to equip with Android One. The Nokia 5, and the Nokia 3 are also part of the manufacturer’s Android One program, and Nokia 2, HMD’s affordable handset, has been released with Android Oreo: Go Edition, a lightweight version of Google’s laters operating system meant for low-end hardware. All in all, HMD seems to be bent on offering its users a simpler, hassle-free way to stay up-to-date on their phones. And this is a good thing both for them and for us.
