JUST when you thought the next few months couldn’t be any busier in the smartphone industry, Nokia has launched its first flagship smartphone under HMD Global, the Nokia 8. This comes seven months after the unveiling of the first Nokia phone from the company that secured the rights to use the household brand.

SEE ALSO: Complete specs of the Nokia 8

But instead of banking on design to woo potential customers, the Nokia 8 sticks to huge bezels, capacitive buttons, and a front fingerprint reader — and instead seems to bank on two things that will hopefully draw content creators to it:

• Bothie mode. Selfie, groufie, and now, there’s bothie. It refers to a mode — formally called Dual Sight — that will activate the device’s front and rear cameras, so you can use them simultaneously to take split-screen photos and videos. If you feel like broadcasting those videos live to Facebook or YouTube natively, you can do so with a touch of a button.

Hello #Bothie! The world’s first smartphone to broadcast live with both cameras simultaneously. Meet the #Nokia8. pic.twitter.com/nMLl8h6YZe

— Nokia Mobile (@nokiamobile) August 16, 2017

Bothie mode samples

• Spatial 360-degree audio technology. The audio tech used in the £34,000 (about P2,246,118 or $43,867) Nokia OZO 360 camera for creating virtual-reality content wiggles its way to the Nokia 8. The smartphone has three microphones to capture what the company calls an immersive 360-degree surround sound.

Whether those marketing hooks will bait people into shelling out €599 (P36,141 or $706) for the Nokia 8 even if it doesn’t have the design chops of, say, the Samsung Galaxy S8, remains to be seen.

Of course, there are other stuff that the flagship phone offers. It’s powered by the best Qualcomm chipset this year — the Snapdragon 835. It features 4GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage, a 5.3-inch QHD screen, and two 13-megapixel cameras on the back. The latter are borne out of Nokia’s rekindled partnership with Zeiss.

READ ALSO: Nokia 3310, 6, 5, and 3 are priced competitively in the Philippines

The Nokia 8 also comes with a 3,090 mAh battery, USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C connection, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. And for stock-Android fans, you may have met your match. The phone is running pure Android 7.1.1 Nougat and will be one of the fastest ways to get hold of Android O, Nokia has claimed.

So, what do you think of the Nokia 8? Sound off in the comments below.

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