text: Flagship Android smartphone has dual cameras, spatial audio and aluminium body, but will be relying on brand nostalgia to stand out against rivals 
   
   Nokia 8 hopes to beat Apple and Samsung with 'bothie', a new version of the selfie 
   
   Nokia has launched the most important new handset in its attempts to revitalise the once world-beating brand for the modern smartphone era dominated by Samsung, Apple and China’s Huawei. 
   
   The Nokia 8 marks the culmination of efforts to bring the Finnish telecoms brand back to the mainstream handset market, which kicked off six months ago with the nostalgia-inducing remake of the classic Nokia 3310 feature phone. 
   
   Nokia 3310 review: blast from the past, sore thumbs and all Read more 
   
   The Android flagship smartphone, designed to compete with the likes of the iPhone 7 and Samsung’s Galaxy S8, features a polished aluminium body, Carl Zeiss cameras, spatial audio pulled from Nokia’s high-end 360-degree camera and a high-resolution 5.3-inch screen. 
   
   Nokia handsets are being revived by HMD Global, a private equity-backed firm led by former employees of the Finnish company. 
   
   
   
   The company is pushing what it calls the “bothie” as the next evolution of the selfie, using Nokia’s Dual Sight technology to fire up both the rear and front-facing cameras at the same time, shooting video or photos of a subject and the smartphone operator simultaneously, which can be shared live directly to Facebook or YouTube. 
   
   “We know that fans are creating and sharing live content more than ever before, with millions of photos and videos shared every minute on social media,” said Juho Sarvikas, HMD chief product officer. “People are inspired by the content they consume and are looking for new ways to create their own.” 
   
   The 7.9 mm-thick smartphone has similar specifications to other top-end rivals, but lacks the super-slim bezel designs of the best devices from 2017, with large panels above and below the screen, which have been eliminated by rivals. 
   
   Nokia’s rekindled partnership with Zeiss has produced dual 13-megapixel cameras for the back of the phone. The new so-called computational photography technique is similar to that employed by Apple, Google, Huawei and LG in their latest smartphones. 
   
   The new phone has spatial audio technology that was previously used in Nokia’s high-end OZO 360 camera, which can play back sound in multiple directions, imitating how it was captured during recording. 
   
   
   
   Ben Wood, chief of research at CCS Insight, said: “The Nokia 8 has some innovative features including the dual-sight function on the camera and the 360-degree audio recording but it’s not yet clear whether these are game-changing features that will lure consumers away from established rivals such as Apple and Samsung.” 
   
   Coming off the back of the launches of the Nokia 3, 5 and 6 smartphones aimed at the low-end smartphone market, HMD said the Nokia 8 will cost €599 (£546) and will go on sale in early September, placing it in the middle of the launch season for new smartphones from both Samsung and Apple. 
   
   Wood said that aggressive pricing and marketing would be needed for the Nokia 8 to successfully compete with established market leaders. He said: “The Nokia 8 is an extremely important product for HMD Global: its first attempt to move into the more lucrative, higher-tier smartphone segment, a notoriously challenging part of the market dominated by Apple and Samsung. 
   
   “The company will be hoping that the widely recognised Nokia brand will help it stand out from rivals such as HTC, Huawei, LG and Sony, which are also trying to compete with Apple and Samsung.” 
   
   The launch of the Nokia 8 comes a week before Samsung is expected to unveil its next top-end Note smartphone, following on from the disastrous Note 7 debacle in 2016, which caught fire due to battery issues and had to be recalled and discontinued. Apple is also expected to announce a new version of its iPhone in September. 
   
   From boom to bust 
   
   Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mikhail Gorbachev speaks on a Nokia Mobira Cityman phone in Helsinki, Oct 1989. Photograph: Lehtikuva OY/Rex 
   
   Nokia dominated the mobile phone market for the more than a decade from the late 1990s, but was left trailing behind Apple and Samsung in the smartphone era following the launch of the iPhone in 2007. The Finnish company sold its loss-making mobile devices division to Microsoft in 2013 to focus on its telecoms network equipment business. 
   
   Now a group of former Nokia executives, backed by private equity, have formed a new company called HMD Global and bought back their former employer’s feature phone business from Microsoft, aiming to bring the Nokia handset brand back to its former glory with a range of new smartphones. 
   
   Nokia was founded in 1865 as a pulp mill near the town of Tampere and once made everything from toilet paper to car tyres, before the Espoo-headquartered company moved in to communications technology in the 1980s. In 1985 Nokia launched its first mobile phone, the Mobira Talkman, but it was 1987’s Cityman which shot to fame when pictured in use by Mikhail Gorbachev. 
   
   By 1998, Nokia had overtaken mobile phone pioneer Motorola to become the bestselling global mobile phone brand, manufacturing its 100-millionth phone by December that year, with revenues of $20bn (then £13bn) and 55,000 staff by the year 2000. 
   
   Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nokia’s first smartphone was the Communicator 9000 from 1996. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo 
   
   The Nokia 3310 was launched in 2000, with the world’s bestselling phone of all time, the Nokia 1100, appearing in 2003. Nokia also launched the first camera phone in the US in 2003, partnering with the German optics manufacturer Carl Zeiss in 2005. 
   
   Nokia launched the world’s first smartphone in 1996 – the Nokia 9000 Communicator – and a series of popular smartphones using its Symbian operating system followed in the early 2000s. But Nokia’s long slide from relevance started with the launch of Apple’s iPhone, which used superior touchscreen technology and left the Finnish firm’s keypad-based handsets looking decidedly vintage. 
   
   Nokia struggled to make competitive Symbian-based smartphones and in 2011 partnered with Microsoft to develop handsets using the Windows Phone operating system, such as the Lumia 800. But with shrinking market share and mounting losses, Nokia bowed out of the mobile handset business two years later. Microsoft discontinued the Nokia brand for mobile phones in November 2014. ||||| Allow me to introduce you to "the bothie." It's not a selfie, nor a normal photo (which all the cool kids call a "youie"), but a hybrid of the two. It's a composite shot from both cameras on your phone, showing both you and whatever else is out there. It's a bothie. 
   
   Crazy idea? Maybe. And yet, if history is any indication, you'll scoff at the bothie now and then while you're not looking they will take over the world. 
   
   Now, allow me to introduce you to The Bothie Phone. Technically, it's called the Nokia 8. Either way it's the first flagship phone from HMD Global, the Finnish company that now owns the Nokia smartphone name. The Nokia 8, in addition to its Bothie-ness, offers most of the trappings of a good phone: 4 gigs of RAM, 64 gigs of storage, brand-spankin'-new processor, crisp 5.3-inch screen, pure Android. It's not waterproof and it doesn't have a tiny bezel, but it does have some of the standard Nokia design flair. It's a clean, slim, softly rounded device that comes in a bunch of cool colors, like blue and orange. It does all the things a good phone should. 
   
   But its bothie-bilities set the 8 apart. At least, HMD Global hopes so. The company made the camera rig with the help of longtime Nokia partner Carl Zeiss, and made the phone for the YouTubers and Instagrammers of the world. The phone has three cameras: two 13-megapixel sensors on the back, one color and one monochrome, and another 13-megapixel shooter on the front. Even the audio has been tuned for 360-degree sound. You can fire up the camera, switch to dual-sight mode, and either capture or livestream both views from your device. Viewers will see a split-screen live feed on YouTube or Facebook, so make sure you don't absent-mindedly pick your nose or anything. 
   
   Such camera-melding techniques are hardly new. The app Frontback offered a similar effect, albeit a more manual one. Samsung, for a while, let you snap a selfie and then drop it into the frame of a photo. You could also make the case that 360 photos are bothies and then some. (Everythingies?) In theory, the feature offers a way to be part of a scene without interrupting it. And since it's right next to the most important buttons in your camera app, HMD hopes you'll make it part of your social routine. 
   
   The Nokia 8 won't be available in the US, which will surely disappoint at least a few creators. It'll be available in Europe and elsewhere for about 599 euros, which puts the 8 into nearly the top tier of smartphones everywhere. That's a lot of pressure to put on the 8's camera, its only truly unique feature. HMD's smart to emphasize the camera, which has become more and more important to all smartphone users in the Snapchat and Instagram era. But if people do like the feature, other manufacturers and developers can likely copy it quickly. Still, HMD had to make phones for someone, and it picked people who love selfies. That might be the biggest market of them all. ||||| HMD Global, the Finnish company that licensed the rights to produce Nokia phones, is revealing the company’s first Nokia-branded Android flagship phone today. The new Nokia 8 will be available in early September across Europe, priced at 599 euros ($705). As we saw with the leaks, the Nokia 8 has a 5.3-inch display (2560 x 1440), and is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage. 
   
   The specs are mostly what you’d expect from any top phone this year, but HMD is sticking with capacitive keys and larger display bezels despite an emerging industry trend to slim bezels down and move the fingerprint sensor to the rear. In terms of design, the Nokia 8 is slim at 7.3mm on average across its curved frame, and it places the antennas at the top and bottom with a full aluminum back like we’ve seen from Meizu, Apple, and even OnePlus / Oppo. There are glossy blue and copper colors, and matte blue and grey options too. During a brief closer look at the handset, I personally preferred the matte colors. 
   
   Grid View Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge 
   
   Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge 
   
   Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge 
   
   Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge 
   
   Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge 
   
   Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge 
   
   Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge 
   
   Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge 
   
   Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge 
   
   Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge 
   
   Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge 
   
   Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge 
   
   Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge 
   
   Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge 
   
   HMD offers camera tricks instead of superior design 
   
   Instead of design superiority, HMD is offering some camera tricks. This is the first Nokia-branded Android phone to feature Zeiss optics on the front and rear cameras. Both are 13-megapixel sensors, with a dual-camera array at the rear that also includes a monochrome camera. HMD isn’t customizing the camera software very heavily here, but it has added what it calls a “bothie” mode. 
   
   The bothie mode (yes, really) is similar to what we’ve seen Samsung and LG do in the past, and it will activate both the front and rear cameras to capture photos or video. What’s slightly different here is that the Nokia 8 will also broadcast this video (with the front and rear cameras) to Facebook or YouTube natively through the camera interface. Ultimately it’s a camera gimmick, especially with the bothie naming, but it could prove popular for sports scenarios or even people attending and streaming protests. 
   
   The Nokia 8 has Ozo audio 
   
   The Nokia 8 also includes another trick, thanks to the integration of Nokia’s Ozo Audio. Ozo has typically been reserved for Nokia’s futuristic camera for filming virtual reality, but HMD is now bringing the audio portion over to the Nokia 8. In real terms, it means that videos will capture 360-degree audio, allowing for it to be broadcast live on streams. If you’re listening to a Facebook live stream with headphones, you’ll be able to hear the 360 audio. 
   
   Nokia was one of the first phone makers to embrace notifications and information on a phone display when it’s off, and while others have followed HMD is now bringing back the always-on display. The Nokia 8 includes an LCD display, so this makes things more tricky than an OLED equivalent, but HMD has built a proprietary solution with a low-power mode for a small section of the display. It will show calls, emails, and text messages, and HMD plans to add social network notifications in the future. 
   
   After my brief time with the Nokia 8, I wasn’t left blown away by the handset. It’s very much an average “flagship” compared to what we’re expecting from Apple this year, and what we’ve seen Samsung achieve with the Galaxy S8. HMD isn’t setting the bar high here with an uninspiring design, a lack of waterproofing or wireless charging, and a price point that doesn’t make this a cheap Android phone with good specs. That’s especially relevant when HMD has competition like the OnePlus 5. 
   
   HMD’s Nokia 8 joins the existing mid-range Nokia 6, Nokia 5, and Nokia 3 devices as the flagship handset in the range. It will go on sale across Europe in September priced at 599 euros ($705), but it’s not clear if this handset will reach US shores like the Nokia 6 did.
target: – If we're being honest, the selfie is passé. Today's discerning Instagrammers require a new way to document their every waking moment. Enter the Nokia 8 and its "bothie." Nokia's attempt to compete with Samsung and Apple in the high-end smartphone market hits stores in Europe in September. Wired reports the Nokia 8 is standard stuff for a high-end smartphone; it's got 64 gigs of storage, 4 gigs of RAM, a 5.3-inch screen, and so on. And the Verge came away fairly unimpressed by the phone, calling it "average," especially compared to what Apple apparently has planned for its new phone. The one thing the Nokia 8 does have, and what it could live or die on, is the bothie. The bothie uses Dual Sight technology to let users take photos or videos using both the front and rear cameras at the same time, the Guardian explains. The resulting video or image shows whatever is in front of the user alongside the user's reaction to it. Those photos and videos can then be shared directly to Facebook or YouTube. Wired calls the bothie the Nokia 8's "only truly unique feature," meaning the phone was made "for the YouTubers and Instagrammers of the world." And they'll have to embrace the bothie if Nokia has any chance of competing with Apple and Samsung. Meanwhile, the future of the American bothie is unclear, as Nokia has not announced plans to bring the phone to the US.