HMD Global really brought it to Mobile World Congress 2019 this year. The company not only brought half a dozen smartphones, but also some new and updated budget phones for 2019 offerings. In particular that really caught attention was the first high-end flagship phone, the Nokia 9 PureView.
The high-end Nokia 9 PureView smartphone is wrapped around an aluminum frame. It comes with a 5.99-inch POLED screen that has an in-display fingerprint sensor, and on the back, you will see five new cameras that sits well with the Gorilla Glass 5.
For what the Nokia 9 PureView offers on the inside, it packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor with 6GB RAM. It’s offered in 128GB storage option, has a 3,320mAh battery, and supports wireless charging. The wireless charging addition makes it the first Nokia smartphone to offer this capability. In addition, it offers Bluetooth 5.0 and NFC capabilities.
Nokia 9 PureView is part of the Android One program, so it comes with Android 9.0 Pie. To further elaborate, phones that are part of the Android One program are engineered to specific standards set by Google and have a pure version of Android operating system. In addition, being part of the program guarantees security updates for three years and two years of OS updates. Since Nokia doesn’t have a custom skin or other apps on the Nokia 9 PureView, it will get OS updates shortly after Google releases them.
Five cameras, you say?
While the Nokia 9 PureView smartphone is impressive, what really makes it stand out are the cameras that come with it. The back of the phone features five-cameras array with two color and three monochrome sensors.
When you want to take a shot with the Nokia 9 PureView, it will use all five cameras simultaneously and fuse the images together to bring you a single 12-megapixel photo. More impressively, the Nokia 9 PureView can take additional rounds of exposure to capture up to 240-megapixel of data per photo. HMD Global claims that the unique setup with the smartphone captures more detail and will give users more control over field of view and depth. The front-facing camera on the Nokia 9 PureView stands at 20-megapixels.
Mind you, the Nokia 9 PureView’s camera setup required a lot of work, patience, and collaboration with Qualcomm. HMD Global worked hand-in-hand with Qualcomm to bring out as much power as possible from the Snapdragon 845 and make sure the workload is distributed efficiently.
HMD Global moved the noise reduction on the phone from the GPU to the DPU, which resulted in a 3x more speed improvements and uses 10x less power at the same time. Instead of the extra workload on the GPU, this resulted in the GPU being used for 12-megapixel depth map for each image, resulting in the creation of up to 1,200 focal planes per shot.
You think that’s it? Not at all. The Nokia 9 PureView brings support for RAW, allowing shooters more flexibility in post-processing, and the apps supported are: Adobe Lightroom and GDepth. Using GDepth, users can create extensive blur in the foreground and background of photos using the 12-megapixel camera. HMD Global has partnered with Adobe Lightroom to create lens profiles especially for the Nokia 9 PureView, which allows users to edit RAW images directly from the phone if you use the app on board the device.
Pricing for the Nokia PureView 9
HMD Global is offering the Nokia 9 PureView in the United States later this year for $699. For what it offers, that’s quite impressive. Currently, there’s no news if the phone will be available through US carriers like Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile. It’s unlikely that carriers might carry the phone seeing as how HMD Global stresses the pure Android 9.0 experience.
