While everyone was waiting for Nokia 9, HMD Global was working on Nokia 8 instead.
Surprise, surprise! It seems that we were slightly off the mark in anticipating the first Nokia flagship coming in next few months. While we were thinking that it’ll be Nokia 9, now it’s looking that it may be Nokia 8 instead. And it’s looking more promising than it has ever looked before.
According to some marketing material recently published by Chinese website CNMO, the first flagship product from Nokia will be known as Nokia 8. There doesn’t seem any major differences between the specs of this device and what we were expecting to be Nokia 9, so it’s possible that it was this device and there’s no Nokia 9 at all. But there’s a lot more to it besides name alone – some chilling new info has also come out in this leak.
The promotional material captured in the leaked images tells us that Nokia 8 is likely to come with an edge-to-edge display and dual-camera setup on its aluminum made back. The aluminum back of the device will curve gently and meet the curved edges of display on sides. And more interestingly, the camera stripe with dual lenses on the back of the device is appearing on the left side instead of being in the center. This kind of design language looks both surprising and stunning at the same time, which can work very well for the company.
Another new bit of information about the device in this leak is the presence of an iris scanner. While Samsung’s iris scanner experiment failed miserably in Galaxy S8, it’ll be interesting to see how Nokia does its thing. We can also see a Type-C USB port in the image, so that too is a welcome addition.
Besides this new information, the leak also confirms some existing info that we already know about the device. Snapdragon 835 SoC, 4GB and 6GB RAM variants and dual-lens primary camera with 13mp sensors are already known features of the device confirmed in this leak. Another major known info is the size of the display, which is expected to be around 5.3-inches.
Finally, there’s some pricing information in the leak, which tells us that the device may be priced around $699 in Western markets. At this price point, Nokia 8 will end up competing with some pretty heavyweight players in above mid-range segment of the smartphone market, which include OnePlus 5 and many of the upcoming Minis (i.e. including Galaxy S8 Mini, LG G6 Mini and HTC U11 Mini). But after looking at all this info it seems that this smartphone may certainly give some serious competition to all of them. We should certainly look forward to it.