Farewell, creepy spider-eyed lenses on the Nokia 9.1 Pureview. It looks as though your successor is going for a more traditional camera array at the back. It could be a very different story around the front, however.
HMD Global, the company that holds the rights to produce phones under the Nokia brand didn’t show off any new phones at MWC 2020. That’s because nobody did, what with MWC 2020 being cancelled due to the ongoing COVID-19 Coronavirus.
HMD Global definitely had something to show off, mind you.
Competitors such as LG and Huawei have made the phone announcements that would have happened at MWC public anyway, but HMD Global is staying quiet for now.
It doesn’t take too much crystal ball gazing to suggest that Nokia/HMD Global probably has updates to its affordable Android One family ” probably the Nokia Number.3 series for each phone, given its trend in naming generally, but what was much more up in the air was whether it would bother with another actual flagship device.
2019 saw Nokia dive deep into the premium waters with the Nokia 9 Pureview, a phone with a more serious accent on camera capabilities than any other flagship released that year. That happens when you put so many lenses on the back of your phone that it looks like a spider’s eye, mind you.
The Nokia 9 Pureview wasn’t the easiest camera to use for many photographic tasks; my own experiences with it showed a lot of potential, but you needed plenty of patience too while it waited to stitch together 5 shots into one composite whole.
Here’s my vision of Nokia 9.2 PureView pic.twitter.com/cJtqvX2eLE
— Ben Geskin (@BenGeskin) February 29, 2020
These early renders from leaker Ben Geskin suggest that Nokia’s rumoured Nokia 9.2 might opt for a more traditional camera array of four lenses at the rear, which opens up possibilities. Will Nokia team up with Light once more for a smash-the-lenses-together-and-process effect, as it did with the Nokia 9.1 Pureview, or will it instead follow the market and go for standard, ultrawide, telephoto and depth sensing lenses?
There’s not a lot of leaked detail around the Nokia 9.2, so we really don’t know for sure. Geskin’s render doesn’t include any kind of selfie notch, punch hole or pop-up apparatus, with the suggestion that it might instead rock an actual under-glass camera. That’s a technology we’ve seen Oppo at least trial in prototypes, but if HMD Global can make it work, they might beat Oppo to the punch.