Nokia 9 PureView review: the five-camera array produces great images but is very slow, often losing photos and the in-display fingerprint sensor is atrocious
Ryan Whitwam / Android Police : Tweets: @rdrv3 and @rdrv3 Tweets: David Ruddock / @rdrv3 : Nokia also says the fingerprint scanner isn't as horribly broken as it is on these review units on newer batches of hardwarethat it refused to provide us and has no ETA on and no reason provided for why the scanner might be betterthis is also not a good sign David Ruddock / @rdrv3 : Nokia says it's working to address the absolutely terrible camera issues but then decided it no longer knew how long it would be before the “fix” would be available.This is not a good sign.
Context & Ripple Effects
February's hands-on with HMD's $699 Nokia 9 PureView framed the five-camera array and in-display fingerprint sensor as the specs that would justify the price; this review is the bill coming due. Android Police finds the capture hardware delivers great images but the pipeline around it is broken — shots are slow, often lost outright, and the fingerprint reader is described as atrocious.
Nokia's response compounds the problem: it claims newer hardware batches fix the scanner but refused to supply review units of them, offered no ETA, and then withdrew even its estimate for when the camera fixes would ship. That puts the review in a familiar lineage of spec-led phones stumbling on execution, from the disappointing dual cameras on Huawei's Mate 9 onward.
First-order effects
- Early $699 buyers get a flagship that loses photos and unlocks unreliably, while HMD spends its launch window promising fixes it cannot date instead of selling the camera array as a differentiator.
Second-order effects
- Reviewers discount the lens-count spec pitch itself — the same skepticism that met Huawei's Mate 9 dual cameras and later the OnePlus Nord's mediocre multi-lens array — so rivals gain more from consistent single-sensor processing than from adding hardware.
Third-order effects
- If flagships keep shipping immature first-run components like in-display fingerprint sensors, premium buyers learn to wait for revised hardware batches, eroding launch-day sales for every vendor relying on new-part novelty.
The trend: Smartphone makers are stacking camera and biometric hardware faster than their software can mature, turning spec-sheet launches into reliability liabilities.