Nokia 9 Android Flagship Smartphone Might Arrive With Telephoto, Wide Camera Lenses

HMD Global is expected to announce new Android Nokia smartphones in January 2018, and one of them is going to be the Nokia 9. The upcoming smartphone is expected to come with dual cameras, and now it looks like one of its cameras may have a wide and telephoto zoom lens.

HMD Global recently launched an Android Oreo beta program for the mid-range Nokia 5. The latest version of the beta includes an update to the stick Nokia camera app. A teardown of the software’s APK package revealed some “hidden” features that may be hinting at the specs of the Nokia 9 dual cameras.

As first discovered by Nokiamob, the updated camera app supports telephoto with 2x optical zoom and a wide angle mode. The interesting thing here is that the Nokia 5 can’t even take advantage of this new feature. The Nokia 5 only comes with a single 13-megapixel camera on its back.

The current version of the Nokia 8 flagship smartphone also doesn’t support this feature. The Nokia 8 is currently the only dual-camera smartphone that has been released by HMD global. However, its dual-camera setup makes it impossible to support optical 2x zoom. The Nokia 8 features an RGB color camera sensor and a monochrome black & white sensor, neither of them comes with a telephoto lens.

It’s now being speculated that these features might be intended for the Nokia 9, which is expected to come with dual cameras on its back. CAD renders for the device even surfaced back in October showing off its vertically aligned cameras just above the rear-mounted fingerprint sensor. The cameras on the Nokia 9 CAD renders appear to protrude significantly from the device’s back. Perhaps HMD had to give the handset a larger camera bump in order to fit the telephoto zoom lens.

It would make a lot of sense that HMD would include a telephoto lens on one of the two cameras since it would be something new in its Nokia Android smartphone lineup. Also, this type of setup is already popular. Both Apple and Samsung are using the telephoto+wide combo for their own flagship smartphone cameras. Another thing to consider here is that the Nokia 9 has to offer something different from the Nokia 8, which already uses the RGB+B&W dual-camera combo.

The Nokia 9 is expected to be HMD Global’s next major flagship Android smartphone under the Nokia brand. It’s rumored to arrive with a 5.5-inch quad HD AMOLED display and a design that follows the “bezel-less” trend. The cameras are expected to be equipped with either a 12MP or a 13MP sensors. The Nokia 9 is also rumored to be powered by the Snapdragon 835 processor with 4GB of RAM and 64GB/128GB of storage.

It’s being speculated that the handset might launch in January in China. The Nokia 9 and the 2018 version of the Nokia 6 were recently certified by 3C, the Chinese counterpart of the FCC, according to XDA.