Nokia‘s newest mid-range handset has the looks, performance, and is overall excellent; but is it too expensive?
Background and first impression
I have been eager to try Nokia’s newest mid-range 8.1 ever since it was announced as the successor to their rather marvellous 7 Plus which featured a gorgeous ‘candy-bar’ design and excellent value proposition even against the Chinese competition.
You see, since Nokia got back on its feet and began releasing a steady stream of Android phones in 2016, the company has gone from frankly overpriced, weak offerings with their brand slapped on, to rather enticing value options with their signature build quality and great software.
So I hoped the 8.1 could provide every bit as much value as its predecessor but with a slightly newer and more efficient chip, and the general iterative improvements one expects.
Well a few days ago I received my review loaner courtesy of Nokia/HMD Global and I immediately tore through the packaging (metaphorically and physically) to reveal a rather beautiful sight…
The Nokia 8.1 is a gorgeous piece of hardware, with tight construction of its glass ‘sandwich’ design snuggly encased in the instantly-classic copper band stretching all around the phone’s frame which returns from the 7 Plus.
From the front, the phone is a beautifully rounded rectangle of shiny darkness outlined in a soft silver and that glorious copper rim; from the sides you see soft silver aluminium bordering the copper band; and from the rear you get the shiny glass (grey/silver in my case) surrounding the protruding camera and flush fingerprint reader again outlined with silver and copper. As gorgeous as it looks in silver, I can only dream of how stunning the black variant must be.
The device just feels fantastic in hand with the balance and solid feel that I’ve not yet found in any other brand’s sub-flagship devices.
Holding down the tactile but ever-so-slightly wobbly power button to boot the phone up for the first time then and the screen too was brilliant; certainly not Samsung S-series levels of quality of course, but for a 1080p IPS panel the display was super bright yet with deep blacks that almost emulate an AMOLED during the daylight. Since IPS uses RGB-striped pixels rather than the pentile-matrix of AMOLEDs, the display is also super sharp and individual pixels would only ever be discernable to those with even better eyesight than myself who are also way too close to their device.
That said I did notice the slightest amount of pixel-shadowing as a result of of screen’s sizeable curves and rather large notch, but nothing to worry about.
Onto that notch though as I think it is arguably one of the device’s few ‘flaws’ I’ve noticed; it is very big. Thankfully though Nokia ships the device with the notch defaulting to ‘hidden’, where the status bar is blacked out and literally never showing anything than the four icons that can be fit on either of its sides. Indeed it’s actually very difficult to toggle this setting and requires using an app such as ‘Automate’ to access it.
Personally, after trialing the notch visible I decided to leave it hidden as it looks sleeker and makes the notification icons nestle in amongst the bezel as they otherwise have little separation and so look a bit odd. Thankfully as mentioned the display’s blacks are very deep and so the status bar does indeed blend in with the bezels very well.
Unfortunately though, I have noticed a few issues with the notch and video content; YouTube videos will expand into the notch area, behind the black status bar, pulling up the multitasking carousel has a slight visual glitch where the app snapshot jits up as the transition animation finishes due to the notch, and some apps, which work fine with other notched phones, still put UI up behind the black status bar making it inaccessible.
It seems like the Nokia 8.1’s hidden notch is not integrated with the Android system fully and so results in some issues slipping through the cracks. It’s not much of a problem however, but does give the phone a somewhat less polished feel than it would otherwise possess.
The Nokia 8.1 also features a ‘chin’ bezel like every single other Android device out there, and whilst not quite as minimal as some (but not all) of its competitors, once using the device you never notice it and in fact it does make UI at the bottom of the screen just that little bit easier to reach with a thumb. I also surprisingly like the ‘NOKIA’ branding on the chin.
Anyway, in turning the device on for the first time I flew through the entirely stock Android setup experience and was greeted with the bland but fantastic Android One experience which Nokia has been shipping on its phones for a while now.
I went through the ordeal of downloading all my hundred apps and setting up the phone how I like it, including with WiFi, Mobile Data, and GPS always on, spent an inordinate 2 hours charging it from 30% – 90%, and then went to bed.
First few days
I woke up to the new day to find the Nokia 8.1 to only have lost about 1% charge per hour overnight, which while not exceptional, is better than most. So I had no need to charge the phone up before leaving as it was still at 80%.
The day was very long and began with travelling to Melbourne city and meeting some friends at a cafe where I took my first three photos with the device including a ‘selfie’ which I typically despise, both with and without ‘bokeh’ mode on. ‘Sacrifices’ must be made I suppose…
Whilst nothing about any image jumped out as spectacular, the window shot shows some fairly good dynamic range though is somewhat bland and not quite as punchy and bright as the scene actually was. The standard selfie is also nothing spectacular however I was rather impressed with the software bokeh mode; not only because it did an excellent job of cutting out myself from the background despite having only a single front-facing camera, but also because it played with the colour science just the slightest amount and returned a slightly better-looking image all around in my opinion.
It’s also worth mentioning that Nokia is doing some impressive things with its camera app as it somehow manages to give a live preview of the bokeh effect despite the phone’s modest chipset. However the app does take a good 5+ seconds to open every time, which is very odd and must be a bug – I’ve reached out to Nokia on the issue.
We then all moved on to join a protest around the corner at which I took many more photos and some 1080p30 videos. I’ll not include any videos here as I don’t think it’s necessary for a preview, but I was really impressed by how stable and clear the footage was, though it was severely cropped in.
As you can see, for the most part the images exhibit good dynamic range and contrast, however none were quite as vibrant and bright as the scenes were in real life.
Far more noticeable however was the wacky HDR artifacting present in one of the images where there is some crazy bright halo-ing around some objects against the sky.
Overall though, all the images I took were of good, if not exceptional quality and could easily be perked up a bit with a simple Google Photos colour filtering, even with just the automatic filter.
I finished the day back at home around 10 hours after I left and 18 hours after I took the phone off charge, having used the phone for 3 hours Screen-on-Time (SoT), and with a bunch of photography, having used 70% charge. Very respectable battery life.
The next day though, I managed to get 35 hours off charge with 5 hours of SoT while consuming 80% of a fully battery charge since I took it off the adapter at 94%. Incredible.
Again though, the phone takes an excruciating 3 hours to charge, despite supposedly supporting 18W fast charging on its included adapter. I believe this is likely some sort of bug so I have reached out to Nokia and will of course report back on any fixes in the full review.
Thoughts and conclusion
So far I have been loving the experience provided by Nokia’s 8.1; it looks, feels, runs and lasts excellently and the few issues I’ve noticed so far are minor and could easily be solved in software updates.
My only real point of contention is the price.
At an RRP of $500USD, Nokia is positioning the 8.1 against big competition like OnePlus and their flagships which cost only 10% more, let alone budget Chinese brands like Xiaomi. This is especially important because the 8.1’s predecessor, the 7 Plus, was only $350-400 and thus was arguably the best option in its price category.
Nokia is pushing their 8.1 to compete in an entirely different segment however, and whether or not it can succeed will be interesting to discover in my full review in a few weeks.
This experiential ‘preview’ is a new format for Talk Android so please let us know your thoughts on it!
Located in Melbourne, Australia, Oscar has been a tech enthusiast for a decade, though only finally getting his first smartphone with an HTC One M7, and moving to a OnePlus 2, OnePlus 3, and now an Essential Phone. Now studying astrophysics and linguistics, Oscar has become immersed in the evolving phone industry, with a great memory for specs and details, he is always looking to find the greatest value and most innovative phones.