All About Nokia 8

Nokia’s recent return to the smartphone business will have the warm approval of a whole generation of mobile users. While the Nokia 3, 5 and 6 all had their strong points, it’s the Nokia 8 that really sets the tone for the revitalised brand.

This a flagship phone through and through, with major components and features that are ostensibly a match for the best that Samsung, HTC and LG can muster. Despite this, it comes with a £500 price tag that’s slightly lower than most of its 2017 rivals – apart from the £450 OnePlus 5, which, in many ways, is the most direct comparison here.

But simple spec-box ticking was never enough for Nokia during its feature phone pomp, and it isn’t enough to win you market share in the jam-packed Android flagship field. You need a distinctive angle and a little sprinkling of design magic, and I’m not sure the Nokia 8 has quite enough of either.

Nokia was renowned for its distinctive hardware design and impeccable build quality way before Apple arrived on the scene. This is the reason it’s in this, more than any other area, that the Nokia 8 will probably be scrutinised above rivals.

The Nokia 8 stands up pretty well for the most part. There’s nothing to fault its design for other than a lack of wow factor.

It’s a pretty typical slab of aluminium and glass, with curved edges and subtle plastic antennas on the top and bottom edges. There’s a little raised aluminium rim around its dual-camera, and you’ll find a recessed, non-clicky home button/fingerprint sensor below the display; this is flanked by capacitive back and app-switching button

Nokia 8 – Display

Nokia has taken the somewhat unusual step of fitting the Nokia 8 with a smaller-than-typical display. At 5.3 inches, you still wouldn’t call it a compact phone, but 5.5 inches is the more typical size – and that’s only going to increase as edge-to-edge screens become the norm.

I didn’t have an issue with this unusual size at all, though. It’s still too big to use single-handed, but it shows off media and web content just fine.

It does make you question whether the choice of a Quad-HD resolution was strictly necessary. Again, I came to the Nokia 8 from the OnePlus 5, which has a larger (5.5-inch) and much less pixel-dense (1080p) display, yet I wouldn’t say that there was a noticeable step up in visual fidelity.

There remains a question over QHD’s true smartphone worth for anything other than VR applications. Even the Samsung Galaxy S8’s huge – and brilliant – 5.8-inch screen defaults to 1080p.

Perhaps more meaningfully, Nokia has taken the decision to opt for LCD over OLED – and this display is a perfectly cool, crisp and bright (to the tune of 700 nits) example. But Nokia used to be known for its smart use of OLED in its Windows Phone days, particularly with its Glance readout, which is present here.

Nokia 8 – Performance

There are absolutely no complaints with the Nokia 8’s performance or specs. It comes equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 chip, which is the go-to processor for 2017 flagship phones.

This is a super-fast yet energy-efficient SoC that will handle anything you throw at it with consummate ease, and which doesn’t suffer for the extra pixels of a QHD display. Backed by 4GB of RAM, and lacking a hefty custom skin, everything moves fluidly on the Nokia 8.

Of course, virtually every other flagship Android phone of 2017 has an identical spec, so this is really table stakes at this point. But the point remains, the Nokia 8 is a smooth operator.

Recent 3D games such as Gear.Club and Guns of Boom ran flat out during my test period, as did fast-paced 2D fare such as ReRunners; on a separate but related note, the downward-facing speaker is a little weedy and easy to cover up in such situations.

The phone doesn’t become too hot when such high-end tasks are running, either. Besides the energy-efficient Snapdragon 835 CPU, this is likely down to Nokia’s inclusion of a copper cooling pipe with a graphite shield, which apparently dissipates system heat across the phone’s body.

In terms of benchmarking, an average Geekbench 4 score of 6578 pitches the Nokia 8 right up there in between the OnePlus 5 (6719) and the Sony Xperia XZ Premium (6492). It’s fast alright.