THE cellphone pioneer from your childhood is back, albeit with a lot of help from a company you probably haven’t heard of. After months of speculation, the first true Android phone with the Nokia branding has surfaced.

Simply dubbed Nokia 6 — which is kind of a misnomer since the handset features a 5.5-inch display, as opposed to 6 inches of screen real estate — it is the first Nokia release from HMD Global, the company that secured the rights to use the household brand.

It won’t launch with Android 6.0 Marshmallow; rather, it will ship with Nougat when it goes on sale for 1,699 Chinese yuan (around $245 or P12,000) in China early this year. The Nokia 6 will be sold directly from JD.com, China’s second-largest ecommerce site.

First look at the Nokia 6

There’s no word yet on pricing and availability overseas.

And don’t hold your breath for a potential launch in the Philippines soon; HMD has its eyes set on the Chinese market (and its 552 million smartphone users) for now. Beyond the numbers advantage, which is projected to balloon to 593 million by 2017, HMD says it chose China because consumers in the country put great value in “premium design and quality.”

Don’t hold your breath for a potential launch in the Philippines soon; HMD has its eyes set on the Chinese market (and its 552 million smartphone users) for now.

The phone itself packs midrange specs — 1080p resolution on an LCD panel and Snapdragon 430 with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of native storage — into a superbly crafted metal housing that takes 55 minutes to fabricate from a solid block of aluminum. The Nokia 6 also boasts a front fingerprint sensor, fast-charging tech, Dolby Atmos audio processing, and 8- and 16-megapixel cameras with f/2.0 aperture on the front and back, respectively.

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