Huawei’s brand-new smartphone, the Nova 3, has hit the stores in Finland as of today. The device is not yet available in any other European country, signifying Finland’s importance as a market to Huawei. And not just as a market – some 400 Huawei employees are based in Finland, in the two research & development centers in the cities of Helsinki and Tampere. Finland is also the only Nordic country to get the Nova 3.
The upper mid-range device is priced competitively at 449 Euro in retail (including tax) and sports many innovations usually associated with much more expensive, high-end smartphones, such as high-resolution (24/16MP f/1.8 and 24/2MP) dual-lens cameras both on the front and back of the device. It also has the same powerful application processor, the HiSilicon Kirin 970, which was introduced last September for the Mate 10 Pro and has since powered the current flagships P20 and P20 Pro. The processor has eight cores and a neural processing unit (NPU) which boosts AI functionalities that are utilized extensively to optimize the camera functions and overall user experience.
The 6.3 inch LTPS FHD+ curved glass screen has a very narrow bezel design with an impressive 84.47% screen-to-body ratio. The notch at the top of the screen is not obtrusive in any way. The 7.3 mm thick glass-front-and-back chassis feels solid and well designed. The 3,750 mAh battery offers a long battery life even for heavy users, and the 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal flash memory for storage (which can be augmented using the SD card slot) round out the specs. The phone can be secured with both fingerprint and 3D facial recognition, and on the software side, Android 8.1 Oreo is complemented by Huawei’s EMUI 8.2.
While Huawei ranks firmly as the no.3 smartphone vendor in Finland, in countries like Italy and Spain it’s already in second place, behind Samsung. In these countries, the popular models like the P20 Lite, the Mate 10 Lite, the P Smart as well as the somewhat older the P10 Lite and the P8 Lite / P9 Lite (2017) have regularly conquered the smartphone bestseller charts, usually with at least two models in the top-10.
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