Nokia 9 PureView hands-on: A taste of our photographic future

The way these cameras work together is, conceptually at least, a lot like traditional HDR modes. Instead of one camera stitching together multiple exposures, though, the Nokia 9 collects and combines image data from each of those five cameras to produce more nuanced photos. In case you're not so great at math, that's a lot of information to process at once — we're talking between 60 and 240 megapixels of data per photo, all of which gets churned into a single file. (Since this is a phone for people who really care about photography, you can naturally also save all your images as RAW files.) The other benefit of having all these cameras is that, together, they produce a much more sophisticated depth map of whatever's in your frame, so you're given options to very minutely tweak the level of bokeh in your photos once they've been captured.

I'll be honest: the conditions on the day I tested the Nokia 9 PureView were pretty lousy. Clouds were hanging low in the sky and rain threatened us for most of the morning, leading to lots of distinctly gray images. Even so, I was impressed with the clarity and nuance in most of my shots — they were detailed to the point where I kind of got tired of seeing my own pores. Aside from stitching that image data together, the Nokia 9 didn't seem to unnecessarily saturate my photos like other smartphones tend to, either. That's not to say you won't find bright colors here; it's just that they never feel out of touch with reality.

I never noticed much shutter lag either, because all the photos are processed in the background. That's a very good thing, because the process can take a quite a while — it about took 5 to 6 seconds to spit out a standard, Auto photo, but using the camera's sophisticated Depth mode adds a significant amount of processing time. Some photos took well over 10 seconds to process, though again, that process remains mostly invisible to the photographer.

In fairness to HMD, the software on the phone I was working with wasn't final yet, and the company says it'll eventually work much faster. We'll have to see about that. If nothing else, though, you'll have some serious tools in case you want to spruce up those photos even further -- a partnership with Lightroom means you'll have special, Nokia 9 specific lens profiles to help fine-tune those shots.

That extra software can't fix my biggest pet peeve so far: the camera app itself. It presents itself with a fairly straightforward interface, but it can be really difficult to find exactly the option or setting you're looking for. Then again, HMD has made it clear that the PureView is a photographer's phone, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised that it's not particularly intuitive. Ultimately, though, it's pretty clear that the version of the Nokia 9 I played with just wasn't ready for people yet.

The Nokia 9 PureView represents a fascinating step forward in the field of smartphone photography, and if all goes well with this phone, you can believe HMD Global wants its other phones to use it too. Who knows: we might be looking at the future of the smartphone camera experience right now. It just needs a bit of polish first.