Nokia 9 and its five rear cameras appear in new video leak

It appears that Nokia really is making a phone with five rear cameras. 

The Nokia 9 PureView, as it’s allegedly called, got leaked twice on Monday: as a promotional video, courtesy of MySmartPrice, and as a still (possibly from the same video), posted by reliable leaker of all things mobile, @evleaks. 

We’ve seen allegedly leaked pictures of the Nokia 9 before, but the video (below) reveals several of the phone’s features. 

According to the video, the phone’s camera system will sport Zeiss optics, with the ability to take “5 simultaneous shots” and capture “10x more light.” Users will be able to change the photo’s focus after it’s been taken, a cool but fairly common feature on today’s phones. 

Nokia 9 PureView will have a 5.99-inch display with an under-the-display fingerprint scanner, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor, 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Contrary to some early rumors, the screen does not appear to have a notch, and has a fair bit of bezel both on top and bottom. 

Qi wireless charging is also on board, but there’s no word on battery capacity. The phone will run Android One with all the perks that come with it, such as guaranteed upgrades and security updates. There’s no word on when the phone will launch. 

If you’re wondering why a smartphone needs five cameras on the back in the first place, that’s a bit harder to answer. The trend of ever-increasing number of cameras on phones is definitely strong — most flagships that came out in late 2018 had (at least) three. The idea, in most cases, is to have a number of different lenses for different tasks — widescreen, macro, zoom, et cetera. Five rear cameras sounds like overkill at this point — and the performance will depend on how well the software handles all that information — but I’m eager to see what Nokia has done with this one.