Friends+Design
- Beautiful, symmetrical design, with a modern, high-quality chassis (metal and glass)
- Excellent build quality - HMD opted for 6000-series aluminum and gave the metal frame an anodized finish - a glossy coat of varnish and exposed, chamfered edges complete the frame’s modern look
- IP67 rated, for water resistance
- The glossy glass finish of course means that the the Nokia 9 is incredibly slippery, and will catch smudges easily - so you will likely want to use a case
- The under-display fingerprint reader is executed quite poorly at present, and has a low accuracy rate (this might get improved via a software update)
- Face unlock implementation is ordinary too - it's slow, and also randomly gets bad reads, even in good lighting
Display
- Excellent, flagship-grade OLED display - the resolution is crisp, the colors are excellent, viewing angles are wide, and there is HDR video support
Software
- The software, like all Nokia phones, is nice and simple stock Android, with no bloatware - and being part of the Android One series, you are guaranteed updates for 2 years
- The software seems to be sometimes poorly optimised for the phone though and you sometimes get random app freezes and crashes - the camera app, in particular, suffers consistently
Performance
- High-end performance with the Snapdragon 845 that powered most of last year's flagships - everything from heavy apps to games is smooth
Camera
- The Nokia 9's unique penta-camera arrangement at the back does one thing well - it's a master of portrait shots - with the amount of depth data captured, the Nokia 9 owners have far more control over the bokeh/portrait effect
- Apart from bokeh shots though, the camera setup is a big disappointment for a phone carrying a camera-centric branding
- To start with, the camera app is both slow and buggy
- The camera's prolonged image processing too is slow, and takes a toll on battery life
- Image quality is very inconsistent - sometimes you get spectacular results, and at other times, the phone messes it up with basics like poor focus, or poor white balance
- Low-light image quality, and video quality is average too
- Instead of this (fairly poorly executed) penta camera setup, most people would prefer having wide-angle and telephoto lenses available - which would allow them to capture a broader array of photos types in different spaces — and be much more practically useful
- The selfie camera is average too, producing results on the soft and grainy side
- The overall camera results are simply not flagship-worthy
Audio
- No 3.5mm headphone jack - and rather than ship the phone with USB-C headphones, HMD strangely packages the device with standard 3.5mm headphones and includes a 3.5mm-to-USB-C adapter - additionally, the included buds are pretty cheap and don’t sound all that good
- Tinny speaker - it sounds distorted at high volume
Battery
- Wireless charging support (though wireless charging speed is not the fastest)
- Average battery life, for the price category, with a 3320mAh battery - you will still get a day of use with moderate usage, but a lot of the competition does better in this regard
Verdict
- Overall, HMD's latest flagship attempt, while it held a lot of promise in theory, falls frustratingly short - its potential is simply overshadowed by poor implementation of the camera and the in-display fingerprint sensor - it comes across more as an experimental offshoot, rather than a mature flagship – you will be better off looking at flagships from OnePlus, Samsung, Huawei, and others
