Hands-on with HMD's $699 Nokia 9 PureView with an in-display fingerprint sensor and five 12MP rear cameras, available in March
Screw everything, we're doing five cameras (for real this time) — HMD Global has a new Nokia flagship, and it might be the company's most ambitious phone yet …
Context & Ripple Effects
HMD's January leak of the five-camera Nokia 9 PureView set expectations, and the hands-on confirms the company shipped exactly what was teased: a $699 flagship built around five 12MP rear cameras and an in-display fingerprint sensor, arriving in March. It is HMD's boldest hardware statement since the $705 Nokia 8 in 2017, and it leans on the Zeiss partnership for the optics rather than in-house camera engineering.
The other half of the story is Light: at MWC, the multi-lens startup announced Nokia among its phone partners alongside Sony and Xiaomi, meaning the Nokia 9 is the first commercial proof point for Light's array technology.
First-order effects
- Buyers get a $699 HMD flagship whose entire identity rests on two unproven-at-scale features — the five-camera array and the in-display fingerprint sensor — making this the make-or-break test of HMD's premium ambitions since the Nokia 8.
- Light's tech moves from concept demos to a shipping retail phone, validating its MWC partnership strategy with Nokia, Sony, and Xiaomi.
Second-order effects
- Sony and Xiaomi, the other names on Light's partner slate, can now adopt the same multi-camera toolkit, so HMD's differentiator is a feature its supplier is actively commoditizing across the market.
- The subsequent review found the array very slow and the fingerprint sensor poor, turning early adoption into a reputational gamble: the camera count sells the phone, but processing speed determines whether owners recommend it.
Third-order effects
- If multi-lens computational imaging becomes table stakes, flagship competition shifts from how many cameras a phone has to how fast it fuses them — a shift that favors vendors with strong in-house image signal processing over those assembling partner components.
- HMD's premium strategy is structurally dependent on external partners (Light for the array, Zeiss for the optics), which caps its control over both cost and the pace of iteration on its most expensive devices.
The trend: Flagship smartphones are shifting from single-sensor optics races to multi-lens computational camera arrays, with HMD betting its premium revival on partner-supplied imaging tech.