Nokia has released the Nokia 9 – its highly-vaunted new flagship phone that it hopes will bring the Finnish company back on top form.
But it’s not the pretty new screen, nor the impressive metallic blue paintjob that has everyone talking. It’s the quite frankly ridiculous five camera setup on the back (oh, it also has another camera on the front – number six).
Nokia dusted off its ‘PureView’ trademark of old for the Nokia 9 – meaning this blower is firmly focused on the photography market. Those five cameras seem a little like overkill, especially when you consider they are all 12-megapixel sensors – but each has its own special skill.
Most smartphones on the market – including the new Samsung Galaxy S10 or Apple iPhone XS – have multiple cameras, but they work a little differently. Usually, each camera features a separate lens with varying focus ranges (a telephoto lens, a wide-angle lens, monochrome, etc.). This makes the phone more dynamic; for example, want to take a photo of your mate far away then you switch to telephoto.
The Nokia 9 does this differently. When you press the shutter button, the Nokia 9 takes shots from all five cameras and then combines all that date into one super high-resolution photo. By stacking all the information on top of each other, in theory, it lets the Nokia 9 take better images than just about anything on the market.
Of course, having all these cameras a slightly different angles mean this phone should be able to handle those buttery bokeh depth-of-field shots with ease. That means you’ll be able to take shots and then edit the focus range during the edition process.
Better news for photography buffs is news that the Nokia 9 can shoot in RAW format, and spit out DNG files (generally, around 28-30MB per photo). It’s what the pros use in their big DSLRs.
Cameras aside, the Nokia 9 is a great smartphone with a few small niggles. First, the screen is not edge-to-edge (meaning it has bezels, gah!) unlike most of the competition at this point. There’s no headphone port (which is slowly becoming the norm), 6GB of RAM a decent Qualcomm 845 chip and 128GB of RAM.
The Nokia 9 will be heading to a gadget store near you in a month or two. It’ll cost around US$700 (or AED2,570) – which ain’t bad, considering the photographic smarts under the hood.
