Nokia 8 With Snapdragon 835 CPU Goes for High-End Smartphone Market

HMD Global is doing its best to restore the Nokia brand to mobile market prominence and its latest flagship model, the Nokia 8, shows a lot of promise. HMD, a Finnish company like Nokia Corp. itself, has a 10-year license to produce, market and distribute Nokia-branded handsets. HMD introduced the Nokia 9 Aug. 16 featuring a big screen, powerful components and a design that rivals some of the industry’s top competitors. HMD describes the smartphone as a  “Bothie,” with front and rear cameras capable of working together to take photos and videos with unique view. Read on to learn more about the Nokia 8 smartphone.

Although many other high-end smartphones are designed without a thick bezel around the display, leaving no room for the physical home button, the Nokia 8 bucks that trend with a big bezel above and below the screen and a physical home button. Its case is aluminum and is manufactured using a “40-stage process of machining, anodizing and polishing.”

One of the Nokia 8’s biggest features is a dual-camera feature called Dual-Sight mode, or “Bothie” in HMD Global parlance. The feature allows users to use both the rear-facing and front-facing cameras simultaneously to take unique pictures and stream multiple views at once. The Nokia 8’s dual rear-facing cameras have 13-megapixel shooters.

The Nokia 8 should perform well, thanks to its built-in Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor. The chip has eight cores, with four of them running at a 2.5GHz clock speed and the remaining cores whirring away at 1.8GHz. The Nokia 8 also comes with 4GB of memory.

Unlike some of its competitors, the Nokia 8 doesn’t have a special user interface overlaid on Android. The smartphone ships with the “pure” version of Android Nougat 7.1.1. On the software side are many of Google’s online services, including Google Photos, Google Assistant and Chrome.

The Nokia 8 ships with a 5.3-inch quad-HD display with a 2,560-by-1,440-pixel resolution. The screen is protected from shattering by Corning’s Gorilla Glass 5. However, the Nokia 8 is only splashproof, not waterproof.

HMD Global’s smartphone is the first from the company to offer Nokia OZO audio. The feature enables­ users to focus audio in certain areas and reduce ambient sounds or background noise. Think of it as quasi-surround sound for a mobile phone. 

On the storage side, the Nokia 8 should deliver. The device ships with 64GB of onboard storage as well as a microSD card slot that can handle microSD cards up to 256GB, boosting the device’s total available storage to 320GB.

The Nokia 8 ships with Android 7.1.1, the latest version of Android Nougat, and HMD Global has promised regular security updates to keep the device secure. In addition, the device comes with a fingerprint sensor to verify a person’s identity and access to apps. Those features should go a long way in protecting the smartphone’s sensitive data.

HMD Global hasn’t yet announced which U.S. carriers will support the Nokia 8. The company said the Nokia 8 will be shipping to the U.S., and technically, it could be capable of running on any major carrier network. But whether be available on all major networks remains to be seen.

HMD Global confirmed the Nokia 8 will ship to European markets in early September and will cost 599 Euros (about $702). The company said it will come to the U.S. after the European launch, but HMD hasn’t disclosed an exact U.S. release date or price.