Hands-on: Nokia 8, Nokia's first flagship Android smartphone

Note: This article was first published on 20th August 2017 and re-published with updated price and availability information.

Nokia 8 officially announced

Today, Nokia announced their first ever flagship Android OS smartphone – the Nokia 8. We also had the chance to try it out, and learn about all the little things they tried to implement to make the Nokia 8 a viable contender in a competitive smartphone market.

It was a long time coming for Nokia – after the Finnish telecommunications company sold their Lumia smartphone business to Microsoft, the brand has taken a backseat in the handset business. That was true, until a couple of years ago where a Finnish startup called HMD Global bought the rights to manufacture and sell Nokia-branded smartphones again. Late last year, they launched the Nokia 3, Nokia 5, and Nokia 6 low-cost smartphones in the China market, before bringing it to an international audience.

In a nutshell, the Nokia 8 offers flagship-tier hardware, along with a dual rear-camera system that's created in collaboration with Zeiss optics. It will also offer some subtle, but practical features, along with stock Android OS for the purists among us. Our hands-on deconstructs some of these points.

Specs at a glance

The Nokia 8 is a flagship Android smartphone with the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset. With this phone, we'd finally have a healthy spread of Snapdragon 835 devices to choose from in Singapore. Currently, it joins Samsung Galaxy S8/S8+, Sony Xperia XZ Premium, HTC U11, OnePlus 5, and Xiaomi Mi 6 as legitimate flagship devices for the current year. Here are the confirmed specifications for the 4GB RAM/64GB variant. Singapore will not receive the 128GB internal storage version of the Nokia 8 – those are reserved for the European market.

Since we've already reported part of the hardware specs via last month's leak, we shall keep this one concise for the phone-loving crowd. If you are interested in the phone's features instead, read on.

• OS: Android 7.1 (Nougat), compatible with Android “O” after firmware update
• Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, an octa-core chipset with four cores clocked at 2.36GHz, and the other four clocked at 1.5GHz
• Display: 5.3-inch, IPS, QHD (2,560 x 1,440 pixels resolution), 700-nits brightness
• Memory: 4GB RAM (LPPDDR4x)
• Storage: 64GB (UFS 2.1), expandable by another 256GB (via microSD card)
• Rear cameras: 13-megapixel, 1.12um pixel size, f/2.0, 76.9° field-of-view, Phase Detection Autofocus, dual-tone flash, OIS (main camera only). Main camera shoots in color, secondary shoots in Monochrome
• Front camera: 13-megapixel, 1.12um pixel size, f/2.0, 78.4° field-of-view, display flash
• Connectivity: 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (MIMO), Bluetooth 5.0, GPS+AGPS/GLONASS+BDS, NFC, ANT+
• Ports: USB Type-C (shape), USB 3.1 Gen 1 (profile), 3.5mm audio jack
• Battery: 3,090mAh, Quick Charge 3.0
• Dimensions / weight: 151.5 x 73.7 x 7.9mm / 160g

Aluminum unibody rear

Part of the appeal for the Nokia 8 lies in its build quality. HMD Global opted to create the unibody look using the typical CNC-processed aluminum. To achieve the continuous-looking rear with no gaps or breaks, HMD Global decided to move the antenna lines to the top and bottom of the phone. The front is a conventionally-alluring Gorilla Glass 5 with a 2.5D curve on its sides. It mostly resembles the HTC U11 in appearance, but the Nokia 8 uses colors that are popular with the mainstream users (Polished Copper, Polished Blue, Tempered Blue, Steel).

The curved sides are tapered – giving an iPhone look, but it feels nothing like one. HMD Global said that the phone is 7.3mm thick on average, but it's 7.9mm at its thickest point, and 4.6mm at its thinnest. That's the typical thickness of a flagship smartphone, which is also typical regarding ergonomic handling and grip.

The depressed fingerprint sensor can found at the front of the phone, just below the IPS display, sandwiched between the Back and Overview soft keys. The sensor also doubles as touch-sensitive slate where the Home button traditionally rests. We noted that the sensor is exceptionally slim, but HMD Global assured us that it's responsive and swift (I mean, who wouldn't, right?). Our trial run did not raise any immediate concerns regarding these three buttons, and any Android user would find them familiar anyway. Sadly, this soft button setup leaves huge bezels around the display, and the Nokia 8's front panel won't be winning users over from the S8 or G6 camps.

Stock Android OS on a flagship

Like its low-cost brethren, the Nokia 8 uses almost-pure Android OS. For those who're only just tuning in, “pure Android” means that the phone manufacturer chose to minimize interfering with the UI's aesthetic, the OS's integrated features while avoiding bloatware-piling onto the device. The result is a phone that comes with a clean-looking OS, along with a host of other benefits.

A key advantage would be the ability to receive timely security updates fresh from Google's coding oven. Allegedly, stock Android phones get improved support and phone longevity, since it is Google's (technically Android's) prerogative to keep older phones up-to-date. Typically, name-brand phones are less likely to repackage Android updates for their own Android ecosystem for older devices because they aren't always motivated to do so (profits, or lack thereof). However, proprietary skinned Android OS by major phone manufacturers tend to side-load innovative features (like Samsung's Edge Screen and Xiaomi's wide range of MIUI services). The opposite of proprietary innovation and practical features in name-brand phones is bloatware (like ZenUI and early Sony/Samsung smartphones from Android 4.0 or earlier days). Hence, stock Android phones are a favored choice for folks who lived through the nightmares spawned from early Android devices and want a “leaner” handset that's updated ASAP.

There are very few phones on the market that carry stock Android – the Google-owned Google Pixel phones and the Google Nexus phones are obvious contenders, but there are alternatives like the Moto Z mid-range and flagship handsets (although one can argue that they did modify the OS to play nicely with their Moto Mods). Between the Nokia 8 and Moto Z phones, the Nokia 8 is the closest to stock Android; so much that it's nearly on the same level as Pixel devices' purity. That also makes it one of the very few smartphones to use stock Android OS in Singapore, if not already the first to do so this year.

That said, HMD Global did make some minor adjustments to suit their phone's features. One such example is Nokia 8's stock camera app – it's designed to support the dual-rear camera configuration with its unique camera modes (regular Color, dual-functioning Twin, and Monochrome only). The tweaks are negligible to the larger handling experience, so it's still correct to say that the Nokia 8 has a pure Android OS.

Dual rear cameras, Zeiss partnership, Dual-Sight streaming and “bothfie”

As stated at the start our hands-on, Nokia 8 uses two nearly-identical cameras for its dual rear camera configuration (we are still trying to ascertain the exact Sony IMX model number for its sensor). They are both 13-megapixels in resolution, with an aperture of f/2.0, and a pixel size of 1.12um. The most notable difference is their purpose – the main camera (the lower one of the two) shoots in color and has Optical Image Stabilization, while the secondary rear camera shoots only in Monochrome (black & white photography), and has no OIS.

When we asked why they took the Huawei-Leica general-approach for their dual rear camera configuration, HMD Global said that the choice reiterates their commitment to focusing on giving users practical features that people would use every day. We can't argue with that, seeing how we've witness weirder (or useless) dual rear camera implementation over the years.

The Nokia 8 makers were tight-lipped about the depth of Zeiss's partnership and involvement with this specific phone model. However, we did ascertain that the German optical precision company did provide the consultation and quality testing. We're in the midst of pressing HMD Global to tell us more, but it is unlikely to happen at this juncture.

The stock camera app features were leaked previously, so head on to our older coverage here and see how it looks like. The top and bottom modes are pretty straightforward since each one puts the focus on its respective rear camera. The middle option (dubbed as Twin mode) uses built-in software to determine if the Monochrome camera is necessary for providing more detail during low-light situations. Of course, we'll leave the imaging review to a later time, where we get a proper spin with the Nokia 8.

There's one more trick up their sleeve – not only does the camera app supports simultaneous shooting with the front and rear camera, it can also broadcast in that format directly to YouTube and Facebook Live. This simultaneous photo-taking and recording feature is called Dual-Sight, and the resulting content is unofficially referred to as a “bothfie” by HMD Global (named after the colloquial 'selfie' and 'wefie'). Cringe factor aside, Dual-Sight actually felt like an interactive tool that will appeal to vain XMMs and “influenzas”, young parents, as well as the elderly for an everyday recording of their lives. We're waiting to see if HMD will extend Dual-Sight to video calls over the Internet, or other forms of support on third-party apps.

Is the Nokia 8 the next flagship smartphone to get?

There's actually a ton of other stuff like Ozo Audio (360-degree audio using the Nokia 8's three microphones, configured using professional Nokia Ozo software), its built-in heat distribution setup, and other minor tweaks to set it apart from your typical flagship Android smartphone. But we'll stop here since they'd be better covered in a proper review, after some benchmarking and testing. Only then, can we recommend the phone based on its merits. However, it has left a positive first impression on us, and it might stand a decent chance because of its practical offerings melded with a winsome aesthetic and pure Android firmware.

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The Nokia 8 has an official retail price €599 and goes on sale in early September 2017.

In Singapore, the phone is available from 14th October and has a reasonable official price of S$769. Is it good enough to consider over OnePlus 5 and other flagship smartphones? We'll tell you soon in our review.

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