Nokia 8.3 5G: First look and impressions

The Nokia 8.3 5G comes as the company’s first 5G smartphone. It sports a lot of promising specifications but may not be everyone’s go-to choice, given its sheer size. Nonetheless, it presents itself as a phone with modern 5G connectivity and a capable user experience.

Build and design

As soon as you pick up the Nokia 8.3 5G, its size stands out. It comes at 9mm thick and 220g, both of which make this phone quite difficult to manage. On the left, you find a dedicated Google Assistant button which has become a staple for mid-range smartphones while the right houses the power button with an in-built fingerprint scanner, the volume rockers and the dual nano-SIM card tray. Despite the size of the phone, it is nice to see Nokia keep the power and volume buttons reachable with one hand.

The top edge of the smartphone comes with only a secondary microphone while the bottom edge is quite populated. There is a single speaker, a Type-C USB port to charge the 4,500mAh battery at 18W, the primary microphone and a 3.5mm headphone jack. While this offering of I/O is good, it would have been nice to see it in a smaller footprint.

Display and performance

One of the big reasons for the large size of the Nokia 8.3 5G is its display. It sports a 6.81-inch IPS LCD panel at FHD+ resolution. While it is nice to have a flat display, we would have also liked to see a higher refresh rate. There is no doubt that the tuning of the display is good but it still falls short next to an AMOLED offering. It would have been even better to see Nokia at least opt for a higher refresh rate 90Hz panel to keep up with the competition.

As for processing power, there is not much to complain about. It sports a Qualcomm Snapdragon 765 octa-core processor with up to 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. This gives the phone the right resources to run Android 10 smoothly and multitask with ease. We even tested gaming performance on the Nokia 8.3 5G running PUBG where we encountered no lag however the game could not run at 60fps on Smooth settings. More so, the phone did heat up towards the camera region. However, one thing that we found impressive was its battery backup, which remained strong.

Optics

Speaking of optics, the Nokia 8.3 5G sports a quad-camera setup. There is a 64MP primary sensor alongside a 12MP ultra-wide lens, a 2MP macro lens and 2MP depth sensor. The set of optics powered by Zeiss looks promising on paper however we still need to test the setup more extensively as we did not find enough time in the few days we had with the device.