Smartphones are really trying to up the camera game this year, and Nokia 9 PureView is one of them. This phone comes with five cameras on the back.

Design

The Nokia 9 PureView is a limited-edition phone. It was presented during the Mobile World Congress in February. The front and back are made of Gorilla Glass 5, and the frame is 6000 series aluminum. Overall the phone seems pretty solid and durable. The frame has sharp edges which together with the side buttons are highlighted in chrome — a beautiful accent which we’ve seen before from Nokia.

The curved tapered back has a glossy mirror-like finish. It’s nice-looking, though the real exciting feature here is a PureView extensive camera setup arranged in a flower shape. The surprising this is there no camera bump at all. This phone will sit perfectly on a desk. With its Curved design, the Nokia 9 sits quite comfortably in hand and feels pleasant to the touch. And with IP 67 rating you don’t have to worry about water getting in and causing damage

Display

Taking a look at the screen is a 5.99 inch POLED display with a quad-HD resolution, i.e. 2880×1440. It’s tall too with an 18:9 aspect ratio. The Nokia 9 PureView doesn’t really follow the bezel-less trend, the forehead is slightly thick, but at least you don’t have to worry about a notch or hole-punch cutout.

At 538PPI images look quite sharp on the screen, and you get deep blacks typical of an AMOLED. Colors are decently accurate too. As with other OLEDs, we see a slight color shift when tilting the display, but it’s not as much as previous generations. The screen is really bright 513nits in manual mode and up to 727 nits in auto mode and sunny conditions.

Audio

For the audio Nokia, 9 PureView has a single bottom-firing loudspeaker. It is quite loud, but the sound quality is rather weak, lacking in both highs and lows.

There are many cheap phones that sound a lot better.

If you want to plug in headphones you’ll have to go into the USB C port with a dongle there is no headphone jack. Sound is good when you plugged in, though, very loud and with excellent accuracy.

Features

The Nokia 9 PureView features the first under-display fingerprint reader from Nokia and unfortunately, there’s not much good to say about it. It is pretty slow to enroll and quite high up on the screen. Once you do get enrolled it’s pretty unresponsive and slow often taking a few seconds to unlock the phone. You can’t even enroll the same fingerprint more than once to improve the accuracy. you just get a message saying “Nope you’ve already done that” If you want to avoid this frustration you can stick to using face unlock, it isn’t the most secure though. So if that’s your concern you’ll have to use your PIN.

There is 128GB onboard storage, and you can’t expand it to microSD, and since the photos and RAW format take up a lot of space, this will fill up faster than you think.

Software

Like Nokia’s phone, the PureView comes as part of the Android One program. So you know it’ll get quick and timely updates. There aren’t any proprietary app here besides the camera. Most of the functions are provided through the google app suite. For example, Google photos is used as your gallery by default. And it even lends further support by saving depth data from your bokeh shots and displaying RAW images. Navigation is done through Google’s pill setup.

Chipset and Battery

The Nokia 9 is powered by last year’s Snapdragon 845 chipsets along with 6Gb of RAM. The performance here is still excellent.

The Nokia 9 PureView has 3300 mAh battery, and battery life is decent but not outstanding, charging speed isn’t bad either. With the bundled 18 Watt charger you can get from zero to 50% in half an hour. There is support for wireless charging too, you’ll have to place the phone in just the right spot for it to start charging.

Cameras

There are five 12MP cameras, all sitting behind F/1.8 size lense. Two of the cameras are RGB, and three are monochrome. One of the cameras is for depth information, and an LED flash takes the one spot. You don’t get any telephoto or ultrawide action here. But the phone combines the five camera images to produce one single photo.

That supposed to have a spectacular dynamic range. However, you don’t see any of that in the viewfinder. It’s only after the phone has processed the shot that you can check out what you’re getting. It’s slow, and during the processing, the phone is heating up and using a lot of battery. Shooting in JPG and RAW is even slower since you have to save a larger file.

In the camera app, there are plenty of options available but it feels overall slow. The pictures taken from PureView are over sharpen but they have accurate colors and good contrast the dynamic range is great.

To get the best out of cameras Nokia recommends that you shoot in RAW format and edit those photos in post-processing through adobe lightroom. In portrait mode Nokia 9 only uses two cameras of the five One of the RGB and time of flight camera, the results are great. For selfies, the Nokia 9 has 20MP front-facing camera with an F/2.0 sized lens. There is no autofocus but it still does a very good job, dynamic range is excellent for selfie shooter, colors are good and there is plenty of details.

For shooting videos, the Nokia 9 uses one of its many cameras one of the RGB ones. The maximum output is 4K at 30FPS, but there is no stabilization in 4K it is only available in 1080P. 4K video quality is only average. At least the dynamic range is wide, and you have excellent sound capture available through OZO technology.

Conclusion

So that’s the Nokia 9PureView. You have flagship quality build, a great OLED display and though it isn’t cutting edge it’s fast chipset. But despite all of that the overall package is a little disappointed starting with the software which is pretty buggy. The fingerprint reader is slow and the camera interface crashed a lot but they could be addressed in future software updates.

Explore a different kind of detail with the power of 5. Native monochrome mode on the Nokia 9. Coming soon. #ExploreEveryDetail pic.twitter.com/dVaaqMmaAE — Nokia Mobile India (@NokiamobileIN) July 5, 2019

Hopefully this month or early next month Nokia 9 Pure View will be launched in India. Nokia India posted a video on Twitter. It is clear from this video that now Nokia 9 Pure View will be launched in India. This small video shows that the Ultimate Focal Length Control is given in Nokia 9 Pure View, and it is coming soon.

The price of a Nokia 9 PureView in India will be around 48, 999.