Nokia 9 PureView officially announced as world's first quintuple camera smartphone

The Nokia 9 PureView was officially unveiled today at MWC 2019 by HMD Global, as the world's first smartphone with a total of five cameras on its back. This is also the first camera to bring back the PureView branding on HMD's Nokia lineup.

Design

The Nokia 9 maintain's HMD's design language as of late with its rectangular shape, aluminum trim, and a glass back, curved towards the edges for a more comfortable grip.

You have a 5.99-inch OLED display with a 1440 x 2880 pixel resolution, which should offer deep blacks and vibrant colors. You also have an 18:9 aspect ratio. HMD is using the new under-the-screen fingerprint scanner technology similar to the OnePlus 6T.

Camera

The highlight of this device is clearly its quintuple camera setup, so let's get into the details. The five ZEISS sensors on the back are made up of two RGB sensors and three monochrome ones. When taking a photo, all sensors work together to collect lighting, detail, and color data and stitch it all together for the final image.

According to HMD, taking a single photo results in at least 60 MP of imaging data being processed. This is achieved by a dedicated co-processor, which takes care of this heavy task. Every picture is HDR and can have up to 12.4 stops of dynamic range, which ends up with a full scene 12 MP depth map.

This will allow the user to use a depth editor to specifically adjust bokeh effects after the photo has already been taken. It'll even allow you to tweak colors and contrast between different depth fields. Photos will be captured in RAW format.

Hardware

Interestingly, HMD is making use of last year's Snapdragon 845 instead of the newer Snapdragon 855. We do expect the Snapdragon 845 is more than capable of handling the load. HMD has also confirmed that making the 5-camera setup with its image processor work in unison with the phone's main processor took a lot of work in partnership with Qualcomm. It wouldn't have been possible to launch the Nokia 9 PureView at this time, had they developed the same algorithms for the Snapdragon 855.

Other specs include 128GB of storage, 6GB of RAM and IP 67 water- and dust-resistance. While HDM didn't reveal the exact battery capacity, the handset is said to be able to achieve 28 hours of 4G talk time and up to 16.5 days standby on a single charge.

Software

Your Nokia 9 PureView will launch with Android 9 Pie out of the box and will have all the usual features like gesture controls, Digital Wellbeing, Adaptive Battery, and so on.

HMD has partnered with Google for its Nokia phones bringing them all under Android One. This means you will get a near stock Android experience on your Nokia 9 PureView, “the way Google meant for it to be” and that the phones will get guaranteed OS updates of at least two years and security patches for three years after launch. As we have seen with HMD in the past, we can expect extremely fast software updates for this handset.

Release and Availability

The Nokia 9 PureView has been priced at $699, which is decent when you consider the five cameras, on-screen fingerprint scanner, and pure Android experience. You can pre-order yours starting today, and it will be publicly available in March.