The Nokia 8 has historically been HMD Global's flagship product. The first model launched with the highest specs at its time of release, while its follow up Nokia 8 Sirocco featured high-end specs in a gorgeous design and an OLED screen. The latest Nokia 8.1 sadly loses its status as a flagship device, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Thankfully, the Nokia 8.1 delivers on every single one of those points. It doesn't go out of its way to offer gimmicky features, and yes, there are some features such as wireless charging that are missing, but for its price it's hard to find another phone on the market.The new Nokia 8.1 is a spiritual successor to the Nokia 7 Plus and it serves two purposes for HMD Global. First, it removes the confusing "Plus" model from the line-up and second, it paves the way for a future flagship model (Nokia 9?).
Nokia 8.1 release date and price
The Nokia 8.1 release date is set for January 14, 2019 in the UK, while in the UAE and Saudi Arabia will you'll be able to get hold of it before the end of 2018.The Nokia 8.1 price is £379.99, AED 1,599 which appears to be great value for what you’re getting. This is for the version that comes with 4GB or RAM and 64GB of storage. An alternate configuration of 6GB/128GB is also planned, but only for some markets.
Design and display
The front of the Nokia 8.1 houses a rather large 6.18-inch display. There's a sizeable notch on the top housing the front camera and the earpeice along with a bunch of sensors. The lip below the screen is also smaller than the one found on the Nokia 7.1 but not as small as the likes of OnePlus 6T or the Huawei Mate 20.While the screen has gotten bigger, the resolution stays the same at 1080 x 2280 which, while lower than what flagship phones offer, manages to provide good sharpness with HDR 10 for vivid colors.Peak brightness levels aren't as high as OLED-based screen though, and even at maximum brightness, there were times when it got hard to read what was on the Nokia 8.1’s screen during a bright Dubai day.
On the flip side, the backlight manages to darken up enough to not make you go blind when using the phone in darkness. This also helps with the ambient display mode that doesn't always stay on but comes up when you pick up the phone.
Camera
One of the nicer improvements that HMD Global has made over the Nokia 7.1 is the camera on the Nokia 8.1. Though it's still 12 MP with f/1.8 aperture, the pixel sizes have increased to 1.4 micron pixels, which helps let more light in and take better shots in low-lit conditions. HMD Global also confirmed that it's using Sony-made sensors which have the reputation of being amongst the best in the industry. The second camera on the back is a 13MP depth sensor that helps take good portrait mode shots with a background blur.
'Bothies' also make a comeback (why?) allowing you to capture video from the front and back cameras simultaneously. Speaking of the front camera, it is a 20MP variant.
Performance and interface
The Noka 8.1 is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 platform which is a 10nm chipset and features eight cores. Coupled with 4GB RAM and the clean Android One experience, the Nokia 8.1 is quite a zippy device.Based on early benchmarks, the Snapdragon 710 performs surprisingly well and is on par with the Snapdragon 835 - the chipset that powered the original Nokia 8 as well as the Nokia 8 Sirocco. In that regards, you won't notice any downgrade in speed if moving to the Nokia 8.1 from the last Nokia 8.
We saw no issues or slowdowns launching the standard set of apps or switching between them. You will see a bit of a slowdown with graphic-heavy games, but social apps or messaging apps fly on the Nokia 8.1
The device we have with us isn’t running the final version of the software but it is near-final. We expect Nokia to optimize the device as well as have the digital wellbeing feature of Android Pie enabled on shipping units.
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