Nokia Looks to the past with it’s MWC 2018 announcements

Here in Barcelona, Spain for MWC, Nokia Mobile (Made by HMD Global) has announced 5 new devices, one of which is a throwback to almost 22 years ago. Made famous by the movie “The Matrix”, Nokia has reintroduced the Nokia 8110, the banana phone, the matrix phone, whatever you want to call it, Nokia is bringing it back in feature phone form, with a twist.

The new Nokia 8110 is an LTE enabled phone, now, even with mobile hotspot, which is a nice touch. Why you’d want 4G on a feature phone (well, as feature phone as this is) well, think about when Nokia released the 3310 last year, initially introduced as a 2G only device, meaning it’s rollout was limited worldwide, some countries do not even operate consumer facing 2G networks anymore, so they then introduced a 3G version, and later a 4G version. by starting with a 4G version from the off, Nokia can do a single unit worldwide, and means they’ll be able to make this usable as a VoLTE device, so it is probably more capable than some smartphones. With a Snapdragon 205 mobile platform, 512mb of RAM and 4GB of flash storage so it should plenty snappy enough, coming later this year (May) for 79 Euros.

Then we move on to the Android side of things, of the 4 announced today, Nokia seems to be going for every market segment, from the dirt cheap 75 euro Nokia 1, to the 749 Euro Nokia 8 Sirocco edition. Starting off with the Nokia 1, we get Nokia’s first Android Go phone. As stated, this is a 75 Euro phone, so don’t get your hopes up or anything, we’re getting a 4.5″ 854x480p LCD screen, a Quad-Core 1.1Ghz MediaTek Processor (MT6737M) 1GB of RAM, 8GB of Storage, MicroUSB and a pair of Cameras, 5mp on the rear and 2mp on the front. Being an Android Go phone, this is optimised to run on the limited hardware at its disposal and comes with several smaller, data conscious version of core apps, such as Gmail Go, YouTube Go conscious Go. This, of course is also Android Oreo.

Next up on Nokia’s avalanche of product announcements is an updated Nokia 6 for 2018. The Nokia 6 was the first device to come under the HMD Global led “Nokia Mobile”, the first one was a 5.5″ 1080p screen, Snapdragon 430 and some other niceties. The 2017 version though, steps up the processor to the Snapdragon 630, which is an 8 core Cortex A53 setup build upon the success of the Snapdragon 625. RAM and Storage is 3GB with 32GB of internal storage or 4GB with 64GB. The screen stays the same at 5.5″ and 1080p, bucking the trend of 18:9 and sticking with the tried and true 16:9. What is improved though, is the navigation, now using the standard Android on-screen navigation keys, and moving the fingerprint scanner to the rear, and making the scanner a fair bit bigger too.

The New Nokia 6 for 2018 also has a new 16mp Camera on the rear, with an 8mp camera up front, Android 8.0 Oreo with an upgrade to 8.1 very soon, as this is one of the new Android One devices, in fact everything from the Nokia 3 up to the Nokia 8 is now an Android One device, which fills me personally with Joy. Battery stays the same at 3000mAh, but that’s fine seeing as it now moves to USB-C for charging, along with the headphone jack for, well normal people, and NFC for Google Pay and, whatever else you use NFC for.

Moving on up, in the numbers game it is, with the Nokia 7 Plus. The Nokia 7 had a bit of a ho-hum launch a few months ago, but the 7 Plus is Nokia pulling the stops out. with a top of the line (for the 600 series anyway) Snapdragon 660 chipset, 4GB of RAM with 64GB of internal storage, plus support for up to 256gb MicroSD cards. A 6″ 2160x1080p IPS LCD, marking the first time Nokia has embraced the 18:9 trend, and not only have they done that, they also curved the corners of the screen, which adds another touch of elegance, top notch Nokia.

Camera wise, the 7 Plus doesn’t go easy either, with dual cameras on the back, a 12mp with big 1.4 Micron pixels and a pretty nuts f1.75 aperture, and the secondary 12mp telephoto 2X zoom drops the pixel size down to 1 microns and the aperture takes a step back to f2.6, but those specs are just the hardware, as we’ve all learnt by now hardware is only part of the story with Cameras. The front camera is 5mp with 1.4 micron pixels and an f2.0 aperture. All of these carry the eponymous Zeiss branding.

Lastly, we move on the Nokia 8 Sirocco Edition, invoking the older Sirocco editions which were exclusive, high end, improved versions of their non-Sirocco variants, and that’s exactly the same here. The Nokia 8 Sirocco edition takes what made the Nokia 8 great, and turned it up to 11. The screen goes to a 5.5″ 2560x1440p curved pOLED display from LG, changing up from the 5.3″ 2560×1440 IPS LCD from the standard Nokia 8. The Nokia 8 SE still uses the Snapdragon 835 and 6GB of RAM, but let’s be real if you didn’t find that enough, you were doing something wrong.

Whereas the Nokia 8 was an aluminium unibody, the Nokia 8 SE is not, Nokia is using what it calls a “95% Vacuum formed Glass design” where the other 5% is the metal band around the edge, Gorilla Glass 5 adorns both sides, which should do nicely for such an expensive phone. Nokia also went with Qi Wireless charging for this and upgrade the water resistance from IP53 to IP67. Oh, and it’s also got the dual camera setup from the Nokia 7 Plus but with the superior image processing of the Snapdragon 835.

Sadly, this is going to cost you, this Nokia 8 Sirocco Edition is 749 Euro. This is a really good phone, and it’s Also Android One, meaning guaranteed updates for 2 years and basically stock Android Oreo. But 749 Euros is a lot, without Carrier support, I don’t expect to see many Nokia 8 Sirocco Editions.

Later in the week both myself and Craig will make it to the Nokia Booth to get hands-on with all of these.