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This could be our first look at Nokia’s camera-focused Android flagship, the Nokia 8 [Video]

nokia-8

Update: Apparently, the devices in question are in fact not Nokia’s, nor they actually have anything to do with the Finnish company. As per a video from WinFuture’s channel (in German), it looks like these are simply reference design phones made by Qualcomm itself. All in all, now that I can see the whole thing better, I’m just glad it’s that way. Hopefully February’s announcement will bring some excitement.

We reported yesterday about Nokia‘s likely intention to unveil a flagship Android smartphone outside of China on February 26, a day before the beginning of this year’s Mobile World Congress. However, it looks like the cat may already be out of the bag.

As it turns out, Nokia’s trojan horse back into the smartphone world was present at CES, albeit in disguise. The alleged ‘Nokia 8’ was showcased at Qualcomm‘s booth, where the company asked people not to take photos of it. Of course, however, someone did (via GSM Arena)…

What we see in the video are two Nokia 8s set up on a small, trembling rig, identical in everything but their CPU, with one rocking the ‘old’ 821 and the other using Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 835 SoC. The latter, on the right, shows significantly better stabilization.

There’s no apparent Nokia branding, but the stills at the end of the clip show a camera bump that’s immediately recognizable for anyone who’s seen PureView cameras before (think Lumia 1020); that, in addition to the overall design being somewhat similar to the Nokia 6’s — and indeed previous Nokia devices, from what we can see — is a sign that whatever was at Qualcomm’s stand may have come from the resurrected Finnish company.

One difference with the 6 comes in terms of physical buttons, which are replaced here by software keys. It would be odd not to sport a fingerprint sensor in 2017, especially given that the 6 does, but nothing tells us that the buttons mounted on the metal trim don’t hide one. We’ll have to wait and see.

The camera could sport Carl Zeiss optics, a huge 24MP sensor equipped with both OIS and EIS and a companion 12MP selfie snapper, two flashes and a heart rate monitor (unless the HRM lettering stands for something else), while other rumored specs talk about a whopping 6GB coupled with 64 and 128GB of storage options, expandable via microSD.

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Avatar for Edoardo Maggio Edoardo Maggio

Italian. Tech geek, video games, photography and music lover, comics-based movies enthusiast, and a sucker for good design. Amateur photographer (VSCO, 500px), writer and reporter for 9to5Google.


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