Nokia 9 PureView hands-on review

Smartphone with two lenses? Pah! Consider a camera quartet.

                                                                                                Price: £549

HMD has done well with its Nokia smartphones over the last few years.

Since purchasing the brand from Microsoft, the Finnish company has released a slew of excellent mid-range and budget smartphones, as well as "feature phones" like the 3310.

In 2019, the company plans to step things up a notch with a more discount offering: the Nokia 9 PureView. Okay, it's not quite a £1000 flagship, but at $699, it certainly competes with the likes of OnePlus.

However, in this oversaturated smartphone market, every model requires a distinguishing feature to stick in the minds of consumers. The Nokia 9 PureView's distinctive feature is that it has not two, not three, but five camera lenses on the back. That may not be the most exciting entry in the Guinness Book of Records, but it officially makes it the most lenses on the back of a smartphone ever.

Why is that even necessary, let alone thrilling? To find out, we had to get our hands on the phone.

DESIGN AND BUILD: VANILLA THRILLS

The Nokia 9 PureView's overall design isn't particularly memorable. The tall top and bottom bezels feel a little 2017 now that we've moved past the "notch" phase and into the "hole-punch" era. As a result, the 9 does not appear to be the most fashionable phone to carry in 2019. That's not to say there aren't plenty of positives. The most notable feature is that, despite having five separate lenses on the back, there are no camera bumps to create an uneven surface when you lay the phone flat on a table. It's also very thin, measuring only 8mm, and the front is made of Gorilla Glass 5. A 2K POLED screen with HDR10 movie playback and an under-screen fingerprint reader sits beneath that glass. However, this phone is only available in one color: blue. If you want to experiment further, you'll need to purchase a case.

CAMERA: HONEYCOMB LENSES

You can't really talk about the Nokia 9 Pureview without mentioning the cameras, so let's go over them first. Nokia didn't say it explicitly during our pre-MWC briefing, but the message is clear: if you value photography above all else on a smartphone, this is the phone for you. As previously stated, there are a whopping five lenses on the back of this thing. All five lenses are working together — this isn't a case of one lens being standard and the others being wide-angle or telephoto.

Two of the five 12MP cameras have color sensors, while three have monochrome sensors. This also means that the phone can shoot in black and white natively, rather than using software to achieve the effect, as most other smartphones do. This configuration allows for a fairly wide dynamic range (for a smartphone) of up to 12.4 stops. Nokia claims to have created a "next-gen pro camera UI" to take advantage of the hardware, allowing you to gradually increase exposure by 0.3 stop. 

The resulting images are fed into a dedicated imaging coprocessor, which is connected directly to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor. This means that image processing is moved away from the CPU, allowing images to be processed 10 times faster. In addition, the GPU is used to create a depth map for each shot. 

This means that each photo can have 1200 layers of depth, as opposed to traditional smartphones' 10 layers. Nokia refers to this as "computational photography" because this processing allows photo editors to add much more customization. This depth mapping is then interpreted by Google Photos, allowing you to change the bokeh blur and focal point of your photos after they've been taken. Of course, as a smartphone aimed at photographers, it will shoot in RAW and DNG formats, ready to be imported into Adobe's software for editing.

PERFORMANCE: RETRO POWER

The internal specifications, like the overall design of the Nokia 9 PureView, feel a little dated. The Snapdragon 845 processor is good, and it can be found in phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 and the Google Pixel 3, but it will soon be exceeded by the Snapdragon 855, which will be seen in Xiaomi's Mi9 phone and possibly more at MWC 2019. We'll have to wait for the review unit before we can run benchmarks, but given the 845's popularity, you can expect it to multitask and run the latest games just fine. The phone comes with 128GB of storage, which is typical for a phone at this price point, but there is no expandable card slot.

Nokia 9 PureView Conclusion

The Nokia 9 has a lot of potentials, but it's not being used to its full potential, which is visible in every aspect of the phone. Because of the fantastic screen and lower price, we can easily forgive the previous generation of hardware, but the camera failed to live up to the promise and expectations. Nokia may have had a brilliant idea with that six-camera setup, but until it was ready to show it off, everyone else came up with and launched a better one. Instead of that iconic and industry-leading camera, we see smudgy shimmers of what the Pure View branding once represented. The Nokia 9 has the ability to take great photos, but in order to do so, you must be willing to put up with some occasional hiccups and be knowledgeable about RAW file processing. But here's the thing: this phone is far from the only one capable of shooting RAW.

• Good Stuff

+ High-resolution OLED screen with HDR video support.

+ Waterproof design

+ RAW files produce excellent image output (requires time and skill for processing)

+ As part of the Android One program, regular updates are expected.

+ For a flagship, it's quite affordable.

+ Wireless charging is supported.

+ Screen with a high pixel density (538 PPI)

• Bad Stuff

− The Snapdragon flagship chipset from last year is used.

− The fingerprint scanner provides a poor user experience.

− When using the camera, bugs in the software, freezes, and crashes are common.

−There is no MicroSD slot, and shooting RAW+JPG consumes a lot of storage space.

−The default JPEG and video output are not impressive.

− The camera's lengthy image processing is time-consuming and drains the battery.

Tech specs

Processor: Octa-Core Processor (4x2.8 GHz Kryo 385 Gold & 4x1.7 GHz Kryo 385 Silver).

RAM: 6GB 1866MHz

Storage: 128GB RAM

Display: 5.99-inch P-OLED display with QHD+ resolution

Camera: 12 MP x 5 + TOF / 20 MP

Battery: 3.320 mAh Li-Polymer battery

Weight: 172 g (6.07 oz)