Nokia 8: Full, in-depth review

Performance

When it comes to performance, the Nokia 8 lives up to the brand’s legacy and shows that HMD absolutely have the chops to hold their own in the high-end of the market.

Credit: IDG

While it doesn’t quite eclipse the HTC U11 (at least, on most fronts), it certainly holds its own. During our time with it, we found the Nokia 8 to be more than up to the task of, well, any task we threw at it. Apps, videos and web pages loaded quick enough for it to not be an issue.

Antutu's benchmarking tool rated it ahead of the Galaxy S8 but behind the HTC U11 and OnePlus 5 with a score of 174,996. Again, while our testing never quite saw it blow away the competition, it’s important to note that the Nokia 8 comes in at a price-point a little lower than the phones it’s almost a match for performance.

Unfortunately, we did encounter a number of stability issues. Sometimes the phone would freeze and crash out of apps without any clear causes. Once, it completely locked up and became unresponsive, even to attempts to reboot it, and we had to wait until the battery drained out completely before we could properly reset. These issues were by no means frequent - but they weren’t one-off incidents either, which is a little concerning.

We've reached out to HMD about these issues and will report back when we have an answer.

Battery Life

In terms of battery life, the Nokia 8 sits pretty close to what you expect from a flagship - and then some. In PCMark’s Battery Test, the Nokia 8 took just under 11 hours to reach 20% charge. In our experience, it lasted roughly an hour or two above the average for an Android phone like this.

Credit: Nokia | HMD Global

Most of the time, we could make it through the day without having to worry about topping it up. However, as always, your mileage may vary depending on how heavily you rely on multitasking and how many apps you run in the background.