Nokia announces its new lineup, including the 8.3, the 5.3 and the 1.3

The brand best known for the most indestructible phones ever to grace us with their presence, Nokia, has announced a new lineup of smartphones. MWC is cancelled. Hell, life is cancelled right now. Which is why the company decided on an online briefing today. And, this time around, they’re going big. 

Nokia 8.3 5G big bro

First on the slate is the Nokia 8.3 5G. As the name suggests, this’ll be the first full-blown 5G device from the brand to hit the market. The 8.3 features a new PureView quad-cam setup with Zeiss Cine Effect, sitting snugly in an aluminium housing. The main sensor is 64MP, with the supporting lenses being macro, wide-angle and depth sensors. 

Up front, we’ve got a sleek 6.81in display, with a punch-hole for the selfie camera. Sitting in the punch-hole up front, it’s got a 32MP pop-up selfie camera. The battery capacity, RAM and storage capacities, and other features are a mystery for now. The Nokia 8.3 5G is priced at EUR600 (R11,200). 

Nokia has seriously packed some great components into this device, like a 4,000mAh battery and internal storage options from 64GB to 256GB. The device will be powered by the Snapdragon 765G. Considering this’ll land in the mid-range market, we’re impressed. We can’t wait to get our hands on this one after it launches mid-year. 

Nokia 5.3 middle child

We know the middle child is generally overlooked, so we’ll do our best to appreciate just how cool Nokia’s 5.3 middle kid is.

The extra effort is not really necessary though, because the 5.3 is hella cool. It packs a quad-cam at the rear, just like its big brother. But this time it’s a 16MP, 5MP, 8MP, 8MP config instead of using the 64MP main sensor. The front camera sensor is 8MP. 

It’s got the biggest screen size to date on a Nokia 5-device, coming in at 6.55in with a ratio of 18.5:9. The base variant comes with a 3GB RAM + 64GB internal storage configuration. There’s also a 4GB RAM + 64GB option. It’ll launch in charcoal, gold and cyan colours. The battery capacity for the 5.3 is also 4,000mAh. 

This one will launch at EUR190 (R3,350) in late April. We’re excited for another budget Nokia featuring decent specs. 

Nokia 1.3 baby bro

We’re down to the real budget device, the youngster, the little one. This is obviously where Nokia excels, making basic smarts available to the masses. The Nokia 1.3 arrives as a decent upgrade to the Nokia 1 Plus. It will pack a 6in display, running Android Go with 1GB of RAM. 

It’s got a whopping (for this price range) 16GB internal storage. It will have a microSD card slot with expansion possible up to 128GB.

Powering the 1.3 is a Snapdragon 215, and also a 4,000mAh battery. This one also launches in both Charcoal and Cyan. Camera-wise, we’ve got an 8MP rear and 5MP front sensor. What makes this one impressive, is the low selling price of EUR95 (R1,770). 

Pure bois

Nokia phones stand out because they run vanilla Android, the purest version of Google’s Android you can get outside of buying a Google Pixel (a range we cannot officially obtain here). We’re not expecting anything really different from this lot — just good hardware and very solid, well-supported software. 

Once we have local information on pricing and availability from HMD, we will let you know. We’re expecting pricing to be as low as possible, as Nokia tends to do. They seem to have something to prove, these days.