Nokia 9 PureView hands-on review

Introduction

Nokia received a lot of attention back when it launched the Lumia 1020 for its best smartphone camera at the time. Since HMD revived the Nokia brand, there hasn't been a phone worthy of praising its camera prowess until now. Nokia has finally pulled the wraps off of the heavily rumored Nokia 9 and while most of the specs were long-known for the most part, specific details about its five-camera setup were a secret well-guarded.

Something to know about the camera on this phone is that not one of the cameras are wide nor telephoto. That's because this phone isn't really intended for the casual photographer - its aimed at the professional or enthusiast photographer. You'll see why as you continue reading about the camera.

Nokia 9 specs

• Body: Gorilla Glass 5 back, 6000 Series aluminum frame, 8mm thickness
• Screen: 5.99" p-OLED display QHD+ (2880 x 1440px), HDR10; Gorilla Glass 5
• Chipset: Qualcomm SDM845 Snapdragon 845
• Memory: 6GB RAM, 128GB built-in storage
• OS: Android 9.0; Android One
• Rear camera: 3X 12MP f/1.8 Monochrome + 2X 12MP f/1.8 RGB + 3D ToF camera; 4K@30fps and 4K HDR video recording
• Front camera: 20MP F/1.8 with Tetracell pixel binning, which combines four pixels into one pixel in low light
• Battery: 3,320 mAh
• Connectivity: Cat. 16 Gigabit LTE (1024/150 Mbps)
• Misc: IP67 rating, In-display fingerprint scanner + 2D face unlock
• Price and availability: $699, shipping immediately after launch

There's an amply-sized 6-inch display at the front with the in-display scanner - a modern biometric solution. Nokia aims to keep the software experience as vanilla as possible and it achieved this even with the new camera features that we're excited to tell you about.

2019 is the year of the Snapdragon 855, so you can imagine how we felt about the Nokia 9 having last-year's 845. Even so, Nokia worked hard to take full advantage of the chip's capabilities to process the images from all five cameras when taking a photo. Switching to SD855 would have meant that the Nokia 9 would have to be delayed quite a lot.

We're going to take a first look at the Nokia 9 and its five-cameras so let's see if all that R&D was worth it.