Nokia PureView 9 comes to U.S. on March 3

At this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nokia (now owned by HMD Global) has done something it hasn’t done in a long time: It innovated. 

The company’s PureView 9 flagship is the first-ever phone to feature five rear cameras, and now it has a U.S. launch date: March 3. 

Nokia PureView 9 uses its 5-camera array in a pretty novel way. All of the sensors have a 12-megapixel resolution and an f/1.8 aperture; two shoot in color and three in monochrome, and the resulting photos should have a huge dynamic range and tons of depth information, more than any other smartphone camera. 

Other specs include a 5.99-inch OLED screen, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chip (in contrast to the latest crop of flagships which sport the new, 855 chip), 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, an under-the-display fingerprint sensor and a 3,320mAh battery. 

HMD Global has sweetened the deal by offering a $100 discount on the phone in the first week of sales, bringing the price down to $599. The price goes back up to $699 on March 11. 

Mashable’s Ray Wong had some hands-on time with the PureView 9, and he found some of its features impressive, though the phone overall lacked polish. Hopefully Nokia can iron out the kinks in time for the U.S. launch.