Nokia 8 long-term review

Introduction

It's been exactly a year since Nokia is back on the smartphone map. The Nokia 6 launched back in January 2017. Nine months later the first Android-powered Nokia flagship - the Nokia 8 - arrived in stores as the production capacity and sales network across the world had already been ramped up to levels worthy of its introduction.

It came after years of anticipation from fans of the Finnish company's design prowess and camera expertise in the smartphone world. Those traits would theoretically have been put to much better use alongside the Android software package than they ever were back when Symbian was a thing, or when Microsoft was still investing in its Windows Phone experiment.

Nokia's gotten this reputation of creating awesome devices that up until this point have been held back by their software, so when the OS isn't the bottleneck anymore, what can the Finns actually accomplish?

Past the initial hype and a few months after our initial review full of benchmarks and tests, we're ready to tell you what the Nokia 8 feels like when used as a daily driver for a longer period of time. Hopefully, this would give you a fuller picture of the device is capable of.

On paper, the Nokia 8 has most of the specs you'd expect from a real contender for 'best smartphone of the moment' title, but it has managed to miss out on some significant recent trends - think 18:9 displays and small bezels, water resistance, or wireless charging. So can it hold its own against the competition? Or is this just an 'affordable flagship' model in disguise, with some downsides that make it less perfect than it could have been? Join us on the next few pages to find out.

Design and build quality

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the Nokia 8's design, but there aren't a lot of overly exciting traits to it either. In a smartphone world dominated by glass backs, the Nokia 8 proudly boasts an all-metal build, yet because of that it sacrifices wireless charging. That feature may only be important to a minority of users, but now that even Apple's jumped into the game we expect to soon see charging pads everywhere in cafes, restaurants, airports, train stations, and so on.

With a Nokia 8 you won't have the convenience of topping up without carrying your charger everywhere. On the other hand, it does have a USB-C port, which should become standard for non-Apple mobile devices in the near future, so at least you're covered on that front.

Just a few short years ago the Nokia 8 would have been celebrated for its metal unibody construction and the way it feels solid and substantial in hand without actually seeming too heavy. Now though, the goalposts have moved and many people expect a 'glass sandwich' design of some sort for their hard earned cash.

That said, it's refreshing to use a handset that doesn't collect fingerprints on its back at all. Whether glass or metal actually feels more premium to the touch is a subjective assessment, but we can probably all agree that fingerprints and oils always on display on the back of a phone really detract from the experience of owning a multiple-hundred-euro product you use all day.

The Nokia 8 is thin enough and seems even thinner than it is because of the way the metal curves from the sides to the back. Since it has a pretty small screen by today's standards, it's also incredibly easy to use with one hand, and achieving a secure grip isn't hard at all. On the other hand, the aluminum it employs is as slippery as you might expect, so if the handset were much bigger then handling it without dropping it all the time might have been more of a challenge.

On the front the Nokia 8 has bezels. Big, in-your-face, not at all trendy bezels. You can obviously live with them - after all, we'd been doing that for ages before the whole bezel-killing trend appeared. The bottom bezel even has some practical use (unlike what we saw in Google's original Pixels from 2016), since it houses the capacitive navigation buttons and the fingerprint sensor which also doubles as the Home button.

It's all well and good until you meet a friend with a Galaxy S8, a device launched three months earlier than the Nokia 8, and you place them side by side on a table. At that point, no matter how much of a Nokia fan you are, you're going to have to come to grips with the fact that the 8 uses a design that will become antiquated much quicker than some of its competitors'.

Branding on the front of a smartphone is something we see less and less of nowadays, and for good reason - with screen bezels shrinking more and more, there's usually no room for something like that anyway. This isn't a problem for the Nokia 8, and whether you'll enjoy the fact that the brand prominently sits in the top right corner or not obviously depends on your taste on the matter.

While one of our Nokia 8 units has survived a couple of drops from less than a meter high with only minor markings, we already see a few big scratches on its display - and we haven't performed any kind of scratch testing, mind you. Many small scratch marks have also appeared on its aluminum back, and once again we can't figure out how those happened - we don't tend to torture-test our phones on purpose. As with any modern smartphone, if you mind even the smallest visible scratch or scuff, then make sure you buy a case and a screen protector.

Display

The Nokia 8 has an LCD panel, which is something that's becoming less and less prevalent among similarly specced devices. It boasts QHD resolution, and at 5.3" in size that results in a whopping 554 ppi density. We've tried very hard to see individual pixels on this display, but couldn't. The amazing 700 nits of brightness it reached in our testing have translated accurately into real life use, as we never had any issues discerning the content on the screen, even outdoors in the sun on the sunniest of days. In fact, this phone's sunlight contrast ratio is the best we've ever seen for an LCD, and manages to beat even some AMOLEDs.

Color accuracy seems decent overall, with one notable exception, that was also evident in our standardized testing: the whites are bluish - and not just a little. This is quite noticeable, especially if you place your Nokia 8 next to an iPhone or even any Pixel (regardless of which color mode you pick for the latter). Then again, people seem to like bluish whites, since a lot of smartphones ship with this 'feature' nowadays. This is something you probably won't mind, unless you're a fan of perfect display calibration.

Black levels are very good for an LCD, but obviously no match to any panel using OLED technology, where the individual pixels simply switch off in order to display black. LCDs have backlights, and these need to remain on at all times, hence the difference. If you're switching from a phone with an AMOLED screen, there will be an adjustment period of at least a few days, especially if you're used to choosing black themes for your apps. You won't ever get those inky, pitch blacks on an LCD, and the Nokia 8's is no exception.

Viewing angles are great, and this is definitely one of the best LCDs out there. It's just that, for some usage scenarios, OLEDs are better. Then again, those can suffer from annoying issues such as burn-in and screen retention, so with each technology you basically win some and lose some.

Camera

The Finnish company's heritage in this space, coupled with the Zeiss branding on the back, would have you believe that the Nokia 8 employs a stellar main shooting array (it's a dual-camera). Well, prepare to be disappointed.

While it definitely manages to churn out decent looking pictures when there's ample natural light, unfortunately it's not in the same league with the best of the smartphone world at the moment (think Pixels, iPhones, flagship Samsungs, Mate 10s).

This is easy to understand when you notice that the Nokia 8's output doesn't excel in any area: dynamic range could be better, details are so-and-so, noise is certainly there, while color accuracy is generally on point but not always. What's worse, autofocus sometimes takes a while, and the whole experience of using the camera app can be laggy.

Here are some of the photos we took with it.

Nokia 8 main camera samples

When it comes to low light shots, the situation becomes even more dramatic. Most of the times focusing is a challenge, and even if you're lucky to get past that the resulting images aren't amazing. In fact, a couple or so out of ten are rather unusable.

The low light performance of this camera reminds us of days gone by in the past when no smartphone shooter was able to rise above this level. The other flagship smartphones of today are capable of better results, and the Nokia 8 can't compare.

Selfies come out good in great lighting, although even then you may find you're out of focus for reasons we don't really comprehend. Low light selfies with the Nokia 8 are a rather pointless endeavor, unless you're into camera noise.

Video stabilization is on all the time and can't be disabled and it produces captures that look like they're from smartphones a few years old, before optical image stabilization arrived on phones, and before electronic image stabilization got as good as Google's.

Nokia 8 videos aren't bad per se, but once again we find ourselves having to point out that competing devices have moved onto better performance. On the other hand, the Nokia 8 has OZO microphones which really help when shooting concerts or things that are otherwise difficult for 'normal' smartphone mics to accurately

capture.

Pure Android

The new Nokia employs a pure-looking version of Android that's almost identical to what you see on a Pixel. However, the similarities are only skin deep, because performance-wise there's quite a big difference between a Google handset and the Nokia 8, even if they're theoretically running almost the same software.

On the plus side, Nokia hasn't duplicated every single Google app there is, nor tinkered with vanilla Android too much. The Nokia 8 uses a launcher that looks and behaves very much like the Pixel Launcher, complete with the Google Feed when you swipe right from the leftmost home screen. Swiping up from a home screen brings up the app drawer too, and Google's Wallpapers app is included.

The only two Nokia apps that are preinstalled are Camera and Support. The former is a necessity because Google's very impressive camera app is not part of Android itself but the company's proprietary app suite that's exclusive to its devices. The Support app (that's confusingly labeled Nokia Mobile Care once you're inside it) includes the phone's user guide, a way to chat with a support rep, read through FAQs, find the nearest service center, and other related stuff - so we can't say it counts as bloatware. Nokia's also added a Files icon that takes you to the built-in file manager without needing to go through the Storage menu in Settings.

The Nokia 8 has already been updated to Android Oreo, though it's the initial 8.0 release and not 8.1, which became available for Google's handsets in December 2017. On the other hand, the Nokia 8 has received the January 2018 security patch in January, and that's something to be celebrated because unfortunately not many non-Google devices actually get monthly security updates. So far so good on this front.

Performance

Performance, along with its cameras' output, is probably the most disappointing thing about the Nokia 8. Not that it isn't fast - there's a Snapdragon 835 in there after all. It's just not very consistent, and comparing it to a Pixel (even from the first generation) in this respect doesn't yield very positive results for Nokia's first Android flagship.

Most of the things are fast most of the time, but there's the odd hiccup here and there, which you will encounter multiple times a day. Small stutters and lag are noticeable to us, and not just as one-off exceptions. The best example for this is the choppy animation you see when you swipe up from any home screen to reveal the app drawer. This one is stuttery every single time, and if you've used a Pixel in the past few months the lack of 'smoothness' that the Nokia 8 unfortunately suffers from will be very obvious to you.

The Nokia 8 has all it takes on the inside to be as smooth as a Pixel, and yet it isn't, because although it nails the 'big' specs certain 'small' things just haven't been properly taken care of. 'Small' but important for the overall feel of a device - things like touch latency, jittery animations, and once again stutters and lag now and then.

Don't get us wrong, the Nokia 8 isn't a bad performer by any stretch of the imagination, and its behavior is in line with many other Android phones out there at the moment. It's just that it's impossible for us not to compare its user experience to a Pixel since that's quickly become the gold standard for this in the Android space, and Google's newest generation handsets employ the exact same chipset as the Nokia 8. Once you make that comparison, the Nokia 8 definitely doesn't come out on top. There's an important thing to note, however, and that is the price difference between this phone and a Pixel 2 (more than €150 in most markets).

Battery life

Initially battery life has been a bit of a mixed bag, with our specific usage scenario resulting in around 4 hours of screen on time before the Battery Low alert showed up at 15%. We then discovered that turning off RCS in the Android Messages app (look for Enhanced features in its Settings) improved the numbers in a noticeable way, although we're not sure why.

We're pretty reliably hitting at least 5 hours of screen on time now each day by the time the battery level reaches 15%. The best result we got was over 6 hours of screen on time with 15% charge still left.

Nokia 8 battery life, from worst (left) to best (right)

Note that our usage involves primarily on Wi-Fi connectivity, with around a couple of hours of 4G data use, Bluetooth always on and one or two hours of music streaming via Bluetooth. Mobile signal has been good, but if you live in an area where it's weaker that will impact the numbers you're going to achieve. Obviously keep in mind that every person's usage is different, which is why it's always tough to do an apples to apples comparison of screen on time. For reference, take into account that the Nokia 8 managed a 78h endurance rating in our standardized battery test, which is a very respectable result.

The brick included in the box supports 18W fast charging, taking the phone's battery from 0 to 48% in only 30 minutes, which means you're able to quickly top it up during the day if you're more of a power user than we are. Overall we've been happy with the performance of the 3,090 mAh battery, and it should easily last most people from the morning until late at night.

Camera app, screen size

Nokia's Camera app does the job, but is often times quite slow and laggy. An Auto HDR mode is on by default, which is great, but the processing required for this sometimes takes a second after you capture an image - a second during which you can't snap another picture.

Double-tapping the power button to bring up the Camera app works, but quite often you'll find you need to wait up to 5-6 seconds for the app to actually start and allow you to shoot. Aside from being incredibly frustrating in this day and age, that could lead to some missed photo opportunities, especially for subjects that don't plan on standing still that long.

While its screen is very good, it's also rather small. Had Nokia gone with the trendy 18:9 aspect ratio instead of 16:9 we could easily have seen a 5.7" or 5.8" panel in the exact same body, assuming the top and bottom bezels would have been trimmed accordingly. The display is not small enough to make the Nokia 8 a 'compact flagship' either, so in this regard the handset sits in an awkward middle-ground position in the smartphone world.

Glance

The Glance display function is welcome, even though it can't be on all the time - the most you can have it appear is 20 minutes when the phone doesn't move. This is a limitation of the fact that the screen is an LCD and having Glance on all the time would have a significant negative impact on battery life.

That said, Nokia's implementation of this feature is less useful than it could have been. Unlike other variations of this concept, Glance only has indicators for missed calls, unread mails and messages, and calendar events (as well as alarm info, the time and date).

So, if you receive a new email it will pop up and show you that it's waiting. But if you get a WhatsApp or Facebook message, you're out of luck. You'll hear the notification sound going off, and Glance will turn itself on but won't actually show you anything of use.

Another niggle we have with this functionality is that the icons for calls, mails, and messages are always present, even when you don't have any missed or unread ones, displaying a "0" next to each. This setup makes it impossible to quickly take a peek at your phone while Glance is on and instantly figure out whether a new notification is waiting for you.

Basically what we're saying is that other similar systems seem more intuitive to us - showing only the time and date and no other icons if you don't have any notifications awaiting, for example, makes much more sense. And then, when you get a new notification, it would be better for Glance to actually display the corresponding app's icon, regardless of what it is. Right now it's a pretty rigid system, unfortunately.

Bluetooth

As with any recent Android device, Bluetooth on the Nokia 8 is hit and miss. We really wish Google would finally decide to fix all Bluetooth-related issues in Android for good, but perhaps they are impossible to fix. Anyway, expect auto-connection to previously paired devices to work around 60-70% of the time, but oddly this also seems to be dependent on what device you're trying to connect to: with a JBL Charge 3 speaker, for example, we have no complaints, not one missed auto-connection (out of dozens).

Things are wildly different with in-car Bluetooth setups, where sometimes you need to power cycle those in order for a connection to happen. Other times simply going into the Bluetooth menu in Settings on the Nokia 8 and manually choosing what to connect to will work - though how much of a hassle this is when you're just trying to quickly get somewhere is hard to describe in words.

Other small issues

The fingerprint scanner is small, and that means you have to be very careful when you set up your fingerprints - make sure you constantly move your finger around so that you 'register' as much of its surface as possible. Otherwise, you'll get many errors when trying to unlock the phone, unless you always place your finger on the sensor in the exact same way.

Installing an app - any app - from the Play Store always results in its icon being added to your home screen, and there's no way to turn this off. That's especially frustrating if you're manually setting up your brand new Nokia 8, because once you've installed all the apps it's then time to remove those you don't want in front of you all the time, sitting there on your home screens taking up space. There used to be a control for this in the Play Store app, but it's not there anymore, and there's no such setting in the launcher's menu either. This might be Google's fault and not Nokia's, but it's an annoyance nevertheless.

Another such issue that's probably not directly Nokia's fault is that when setting the 8 up for the first time we couldn't import the backup from our Pixel 2 XL, because it was made using a newer version of Android than what the Nokia 8 is running (8.1 vs. 8.0). So the setup procedure was all manual, just like in the olden days when Android was an infant in the mobile world.

Finally, the top row of the app drawer houses your most used apps. This is a great idea in theory, but it's let down by the implementation here. On Pixels, which have a similar-looking but apparently not identical launcher, apps you have added to your home screens are excluded from this row. That's not the case on the Nokia 8, which means that this row becomes useless most of the time, simply showing you apps you already have on your home screens somewhere. It could have provided a quick way to launch a few apps that you only use sometimes and thus haven't bothered to add to a home screen, but alas it just gives you redundant options.

Conclusion

Living with the Nokia 8 day in, day out is generally a good experience. Overall this is a good first effort for a flagship Android device. Let's not forget that despite Nokia's long history in mobile, that's exactly what it is - the first ever Nokia-branded top of the line model running Google's OS. The Nokia 8 has a good build, is easy to handle, and it feels quite premium with its metal unibody fit and finish.

The problem is that, despite bringing a great screen, good battery life, and flagship specs to the table, it doesn't particularly excel at anything. It's not a bad phone, but it struggles to stand out in the crowded Android world of today. In fact, its design is a good metaphor for the entire product - we'd call it safe and just a little bit outdated by now. There's absolutely nothing earth-shattering about the way the Nokia 8 looks, and similarly there's nothing overly exciting about the entire package either.

Moreover, it's definitely not perfect, with the main areas of concern being the cameras and the surprisingly inconsistent day to day performance given the silicon it employs and the pure version of Android it runs.

The most frustrating thing about the Nokia 8 is that it could have been so much better, so much more of a contender for the 'best smartphone of the moment' title, but when you look at the pictures it captures or when you encounter the odd software stutter or lag you realize it just can't hold a candle to some of its competitors.

On the other hand, most of those competitors, aside from the OnePlus 5T, are more expensive, so perhaps it's better to think of the Nokia 8 not as an all-out flagship, but as an affordable premium device that comes with some assorted downsides - much like the OnePlus 5T, actually.

There are now not one but two rumored handsets that are expected to outclass the Nokia 8 later in 2018, namely the Nokia 9 and Nokia 10, so perhaps the Finnish company will finally produce a compromise-free top of the line device with either of those. We'll have to wait and see.

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