All this talk about foldable phones can get a little overwhelming. Speaking of overwhelming, HMD just announced a Nokia phone that has five cameras.
Meet the Nokia PureView 9. HMD has been showing it off at Mobile World Congress, and it’s created a little buzz. The Nokia PureView 9 has five cameras on the back to produce brilliant photos that rival the Google Pixel and the iPhone. But these cameras work in tandem, they’re sort of like the eyes on an insect.
Essentially, the Nokia PureView 9 uses all five of its 12 MP cameras for every photo that you take. The images from these photos are pressed together in a process called “image stacking,” and a super high quality 60 MP photo is made. The Nokia PureView 9 also has GDepth capabilities, so it’s able to use those five cameras to create photos with depth (the subject is sharp, the background is blurred).
Once you get past the five cameras, the Nokia PureView 9 is relatively simple. It contains a Snapdragon 845, which is a year old processor that most new phones have already superseded. It only has one selfie camera, but it has a 6.41″ OLED display with a built-in fingerprint reader, 128 GB of storage, and 6GB of RAM. No, it doesn’t have a headphone jack.
This year’s Mobile World Congress has been exciting, strange, and excessive already. We’ve got foldable phones, phones that clip together (weird), and 1 TB SD cards. So HMD’s presentation at the MWC comes as a breath of fresh air, I guess.
While the Nokia PureView 9 may sound like an exciting technical advance, it might just be a weird gimmick. It’s going to cost more than $700, so consumers are faced with a funny choice: should you buy a powerful phone with good cameras, like the Google Pixel 3, or should you sacrifice processing power for the Nokia PureView 9’s five cameras?
Source: Arstechnica, Nokia/HMD
