Nokia, there's a name we haven't heard for a while in the mobile phone market. For most part of the 90's and early 2000's the Finnish cellular phone manufacturer was the market leader. They built their reputation by making great quality phones, being the leaders in technology at the time and of course make phones that were desirable to all types of people, be it the business man or the average college going kid and not to mention they were virtually indestructable. As the years went on, Nokia started to face some stiff competition from the likes of Motorola, Ericsson and Siemens, and with many of those brands teaming up with other technology companies for new ideas and functions on their devices, it was time for Nokia to do so themselves. They made a bold move by teaming up with software giants Microsoft who eventually bought them off in 2015, only for them to let go of the company the next year.
Though much like their phones of the 90's the brand is refusing to die, and have announced their comeback to the market in style with the launch of the Nokia 6. The phone is currently only available in China but it's nice to see they added quite a new twist to what we used to but keeping the standards that we know, personally I think it's great! With the rise in Chinese mobile phone manufacturers in the market, China is the ideal place to test your product out for consumer research, the Nokia 6 sold out after being put on sale online in within a minute! Yes there was limited stocks but that is pretty impressive seeing that Nokia have been out for a while and no one knew what to expect from them. The Nokia 6 is as an Android based phone, it runs on v7.0 (Nougat) and has a Qualcomm MSM8937 Snapdragon 430 chipset with a Octa-core 1.4GHz Cortex-A53 CPU, it also has a Adreno 505 GPU. Memory wise, it's packing big with 64GB internal storage as well as a MicroSD slot which can take up to 256GB card. The phone has 4GB RAM which is well sufficient for a phone of this nature.
When Microsoft teamed up to make the Lumia range, they adopted help from Carl Ziess for the camera technology, it's a pity that partnership didn't continue with the brand but never the less the camera on the Nokia 6 doesn't seem too shabby. it comes with a 16 megapixel primary camera, key features of it include phase detection autofocus, dual-LED flash, geo-tagging, face detection, panorama and HDR. It records videos in 1080@30fps resolution. Front facing camera is an 8 megapixel with 1080 recording capabilities.
Another key feature of Nokia's of old were their build quality and it seems they didn't take any shortcuts with this one. The entire phone is a solid aluminium shell molded and chiseled into shape, it has nice clean lines with a silver bevel on the edges, the screen has the trusty Corning Gorilla Glass 3 which houses a 5.5" IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen with 16M colours. In ratio to the phone size, the screen to body ratio is 70.7%, There is is section at the bottom of the phone that houses the key buttons as well as a finger print reader.
Overall it looks like a pretty good device and while it might not be available worldwide, it's great to see the brand make an emergence into the market. It's not far off from the other high end business type smart phones but they seem to have everything there to take on the bigger fish in the market. For now people might be drawn to the phone due to its heritage but until we have it in our hands for testing, there's only so much we can tell from the stats.
