The MWC 2019 has started in its full glory and we already saw a few major events till now. Nokia also had an event today where the most anticipated smartphone is Nokia 9. And finally, after almost 2 years of leaks and rumours, Nokia 9 PureView unveiled at Barcelona with whopping 6 Rear Cameras. What’s so special in this camera setup? Let’s find out.
Specifications & Design:
This Nokia 9 PureView is covered by glass from front and back with metal framing at the sides. It sports a 5.99-inch P-OLED display with Quad HD+ (1440×2880) resolution giving the density of 538ppi. It has 18:9 aspect ratio but only 79.7% of screen to body ratio, which is good if you don’t want any time of notch, punch hole, or slider mechanism. For better visual experience there is HDR10 support as well. The Gorilla Glass 5 protects this display. It comes with last year’s Snapdragon 845 octa core processor with Adreno 630 GPU. Well there should be Snapdragon 855 instead but Nokia gave an explanation that combining CPU, GPU, ISP and DSP for the image processing of their unique camera setup requires time and thus, it’s difficult to put the latest chip inside.
It has just a single storage options and that is 6GB of RAM with 128GB of storage, but with expandable storage up to 512GB. Maybe Nokia Understood that giving those 8/10/12GB RAM is useless for a clean Android interface. Talking about the interface, this Nokia 9 PureView comes with Android 9.0 Pie out of the box. And as it’s an Android One smartphone, the user interface is pure stock and the updates will be faster. It packs just a 3320mAh battery which I think would be the only weak point of the device. But as it supports Quick Charge 3 (18W) wireless charging and 10W Qi wireless charging, battery should not be a very big deal.
It has in-display fingerprint sensor for protection, along with AI based face unlock. For protection it has IP68 certification for dust and water resistance. The 3.5mm headphone jack is missing here, for unknown reason obviously. Connectivity wise it supports 4G, Wi-Fi 802.11, Bluetooth 5.0, GPS, NFC, and Type-C port. It has only one color option i.e. Midnight Blue.
Camera:
Now talking about the highlight of this phone, the Camera. On the rear it has total six cameras. Two RGB, three Monochrome, and one TOF for depth sensing. All RGB and Monochrome cameras all are 12MP sensors with f1.8 Zeiss Optic lens and 1.25µm pixel size. No OIS is present here. We all were expecting that we will get all those features like Telephoto and wide angle, but that’s not the case at all. Nokia decided to focus more on raw photos this time. What these five cameras will do is capturing single shots five times and combines them together to get some very awesome dynamic range.
We already heard about this in many previous smartphones, but they all do this with one camera only, so it takes time to combine them and the detail level gets compromised a bit. But here five different cameras do the task so the quality should be incredible. And with the sample images given below, Nokia proved their point. The dynamic range is something we haven’t seen in most of the smartphones. Obviously this image would have been taken as well as edited professionally, because it’s a sample image by the company itself.
And as this phone has ample amount of cameras and TOF camera also, the bokeh quality is also claimed to be exceptional. It can make depth map with 1200 layers of depth data, which is only 10 in most of the smartphones. All this results in much realistic background blur with more natural focus (means no glitch on corner of the subject). Also the portrait shots can be taken from the distance of 40 meters. And later Google Photos can let you adjust the amount of blur as well.
This Nokia 9 can also capture full-fledged RAW format images to get maximum details possible as well as edit them professionally. Nokia collaborated with Adobe and Google to fully support the RAW images on Adobe software and Google Photos. For the phone itself, the Adobe Lightroom free version supports the RAW file. There is nothing much special in video recording. It can record videos up to 4K at 30fps. Lastly, the front facing camera has single 20MP shooter with f1.8 lens and Tetracell Pixel Binning support, which combines four pixels into one to give less noise image with 5MP resolution.
Pricing & Availability:
- It is priced at $699 (Rs.50,000 approx)
- As of now we don’t know anything about the availability in any region.
- It might be available in limited stocks only and Nokia might now produce even the second batch units.
So that’s all the information we have as of now. This is the camera smartphone many are waiting for. Because there are many people like me who don’t want fancy telephoto, wide-angle lens, and AI modes, but want to capture incredible natural photos. The pricing is also very good beside the fact that the company has invested a lot in R&D for this camera setup. But the major drawback we find here is the lack of OIS and Snapdragon 845 processor. This is still a very powerful processor but latest it always best. But maybe by the end of this year Nokia might launch Snapdragon 855 equipped Nokia 9.1 or something.
Well, what are your thoughts on this Nokia 9 PureView? And specially on this camera setup? Let us know in the comment section below. Also stay tuned with us for more information.
