DON'T Buy Nokia 8.3 5G Just Yet - Unboxing and Review By Eric Okafor

Hey guys, it’s Eric here and this is my Nokia 8.3 5G unboxing and review. I have been using it for about 2 months now. First of, let’s see what we have in the box. When you open this up, you’re greeted with the smart phone wrapped in plastic. 
Let’s take out the sticker on the front. This is the polar night color and it is the only color this comes in.

Sealed tightly here is the SIM ejection tool. Underneath that is get started guide, product and safety. We can see all the supported bands here including Glo 4G band 28. Of course there’s 5G and NFC support here too. We get a clear TPU case.

Now this case here is region specific and you shouldn’t be too excited about rocking it coz it doesn’t feel like very high quality + no raisivity to protect the front either. 
Boxed away, you have an 18 watt fast charger, a USB type C cable and a pair of earphones, all in Nokia’s signature black oh wait. The earphones are actually blue black to match the color of the phone. Nice! 
Nokia also generously sent me their power buds lite and I’m just going to take it out the box to show you what comes in it. You have the home for your ear buds, it has a USB type C port.

with the buds in it. Some literature, a USB type C cable and some extra ear bud tips. Tested it and it feels chunky in the ear, not the most comfortable, sounded above average, good bass but the bluetooth signal is not that great coz this isn’t a high end accessory. It also comes in black but you don’t get it for free when you buy the phone so let’s not waste any more time on it. Moving on On the front, you have a 6.81 inch FHD+ IPS LCD display with 20 by 9 aspect ratio. On the top left corner, you have a punch hole that houses a 24 megapixel camera.



On the back, you have a 64 megapixel quad camera set up with dual flash and some Nokia branding. On the left you have a dedicated google assistant button On the right you have your volume rocker and a power button that doubles up as a fingerprint sensor. You also get a hybrid tray that holds 2 Nano SIM cards or 1 Sim and an SD Card. 
On the top you have a a microphone On the bottom you have a speaker, a USB type C port, a second microphone and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The Nokia 8.3 is a massive phone. Bigger than the biggest phone I’ve ever reviewed and probably the heaviest.

It’s a glass aluminium sandwich but it attracts a lot of prints so well that case does come in handy. Also for that huge camera bump. Corning gorilla glass on both sides. Nokia has used this circular camera layout design a couple of times before and after the 8.3 and I think I prefer the charcoal matte black implementation on the 7.2 that I reviewed. That felt more premium than this.

This gradient color is really mesmerising. 
 On the front, we get thick looking bezels and a chin that’s big enough to fit Nokia’s logo. I think I’ve gotten used to Nokia branding their chins now. Is it forgivable tho? Still on the display, Colors look punchy and bright outdoors, YouTube videos are capped at 1080P and that’s okay. IPS LCD at this price makes absolutely no sense and 60hz refresh rate is basically a slap on the face.


My review unit comes with 128 Gigs of storage and 8 gigs of ram. You get about 104 Gigs of available storage. That is rather unusual for the stock android 10 which it is running on. There isn’t even YouTube music app pre-installed, that’s how non-existent bloatware is on here. 

You get 2 years of software updates so we’re definitely getting Android 11 and 12.

There’s a bit of delay for the 11, not sure why. That also means we don’t get screen record feature in the quick settings, so a third party one would have to suffice for the time being. 

The user experience is very clean. I used it with gestures on, which is a chore and while I didn’t pull my hair out oh wait I don’t even have hair, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did on the portable Google Pixel 5. This phone is not easy to use in one hand, no matter what navigation style you prefer.

The edge that digs into my palm was always accidentally pressing something. 
 We get dark theme in the display settings as well as white balance and Puredisplay. 

That Google assistant button can be disabled but cannot be reconfigured to do any other function. 
The Nokia 8.3 uses the Snapdragon 765G Octa-Core CPU clocked at 2.4GHZ and It’s a fairly powerful gaming midrange chipset that handles everything with ease. I am impressed by how well it performs with this chipset, compared to the Google Pixel 5, which actually hangs quite a lot, while spotting the exact same chipset.

Maybe the Android 11 version on there is buggy, I don’t know. 
Some of you might be surprised that it isn’t a flagship chipset but HMD global actually does strange things like this, I mean they did release the Nokia 9 pureview, with a year old flagship chipset. Didn’t they? 
The fingerprint sensor doesn’t do well with locking and unlocking in quick succession and the animation isn’t the fastest but it is pretty accurate all the time and I have no complaints whatsoever in real day to day use. As for the less secure face unlock, it is surprisingly slow. A hit or miss with any type of lighting and it will most certainly not read your face in pitch darkness.

On the plus side and I mean a tinny little plus, it never unlocks accidentally, I mean it barely does so on purpose hehe. Here’s how the speaker compares side by side the Pixel 5. 

When it comes to gaming, as usual I played PUBG on HD graphics and high frame rates, the highest PUBG setting for this phone. Gaming on a phone this size is quite enjoyable but what would have made it even more so is a faster refresh and touch sampling rate. Like I said early, it spots a gaming chip so you would not have any issues running the likes of Fortnite on this phone.

It is powered by a 4500mAh battery and I put it through my usual battery test, about 3 hours of PUBG, 3 hours on Instagram and a couple of hours on other social media platforms all on WiFi. 
This gave me over 10+ hours of screen on time and while that should actually get you through a full day, I didn’t get exceptional standby on here as we’ve come to expect with midrange phones. The Snapdragon 765 is more powerful but not as battery efficient as the snapdragon 730 which I’m used to. 
It took me approximately 2 hours for a full charge with the fast charger that came in the box. 
When it comes to the Camera, Nokia usually goes overboard even with their less expensive phones and on here, they sort of over deliver in features.

Asides all the usual suspects like pro mode, time lapse, slow mo and night mode, it has something called cinema mode which, just like the pro mode, an ordinary user like me cannot possibly do it justice. Let’s see some photos. Outdoors, the selfie camera shows great skin tone, looks very detailed, almost too detailed. We get a bit of over exposure, what some refer to as ‘melanin glow’, when it happens on their iPhones. The depth sensing on this portrait selfie is actually excellent, if you like intense bokeh but it is definitely over saturated and not in a good way.

Primary camera AI which tends to focus on human subjects and blur everything else a little bit. The exposure is well balance and I love the results here. 
Using portrait mode, I think we can call this a portrait king as far as midrangers go. Heck even some flagships are more prone to hit or miss portrait shots *coughs* Samsung *coughs*

Let’s introduce GCAM. 

The GCAM shot here is glowing and is a hell of a lot more detailed than photo from the default camera.


 On the primary camera, I’d say my actual skin tone is somewhere in between but closer to GCAM and it goes beyond just saturation. I mean you can actually see the color of my iris on the GCAM shot. 
 If you’re watching this and you already own the Nokia 8.3 5G, the link to the GCAM version I used will be in my pinned comment. A sub to the channel will also be appreciated, I feel like I don’t say this enough. I tested the macro camera and the quality is looking like something out of a qvga camera, piss poor.

We get really amazing High dynamic range on this phone and the AI hardly ever disappoints. 

Not even with wide angle shots. I feel like Nigerian sky isn’t doing justice to this landscape. Indoors, the difference here is quite a lot. If you want a lot of details in your selfie, use GCAM and if you want to see a smoother skin, use the default camera.



HDR+ kicked in here using the primary camera indoors and now it’s so good that it sort of looks like what you’d expect from GCAM. I think this might be the best indoor primary camera output I’ve shown on my channel and even with portrait mode, it is way better than the GCAM shot. Night mode is not bad but GCAM shot beat it hands down and GCAM even comes close to the iPhone’s night mode. Of course the iPhone 11 Pro doesn’t get night mode for the selfie camera but somehow I still prefer the iPhone’s shot. It records videos in 4K from the primary camera and 2K from the selfie camera As you know, Nokia never tries to compete for the best spec to price ratio and that has never been truer than now.

The price sits at N243,600 Naira which converts to $520 US dollars and it begs the question, what are people actually paying all that money for? Well, you have 5G connectivity, that supports a whole lot of 5G bands, but sadly, it is not commercially available in this part of the World yet. It also bugs me that we haven’t gotten Android 11 Update yet and updates are like a very very key selling point for Nokia users, who tend to use their phones for years and years. 
I think it’s bad enough that this uses 60hz refresh rate but it gets worse. Why ship a 500USD smartphone with an LCD display in late 2020? Uhnuhn Even with that exceptional cinematic camera and gaming CPU, I cannot recommend you buy it at the current price but there’s light at the end of the tunnel. As time goes by, prices drop + Nokia has other midrange phones lined up for 2021.

For those looking to switch from the 7.1 or 7.2, you will find a more worthy upgrade later in the year. 
If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up and share it, also follow me on Twitter or Instagram to see what i’m up to. Do subscribe for more videos like this as it will mean a lot to me and i’ll see you in the next one. Peace. 
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Source : Eric Okafor