Nokia 8 Sirocco

The Nokia 8 Sirocco is the luxury model in the 2018 Nokia phone range. It has a curvy front, is very slim and feels denser than even a lot of expensive phones, including the LG G7 ThinQ and HTC U12 Plus.

It’s not quite as successful as the more all-embracing Nokia 7 Plus, though.

The Nokia 8 Sirocco doesn’t have the 18:9 screen a phone needs to look modern these days, the display does not suit the curved design, the chipset is from 2017, and while the camera is good, it doesn’t challenge the best.

This is a solid phone, but not quite strong enough to earn a top score at its relatively high price.

Nokia 8 Sirocco price and availability

• Out now
• Costs  £699 / AU$1,199 (around $940)
• Not coming to the US

The Nokia 8 Sirocco is the second ‘Nokia 8’ phone. The first appeared in August 2017. This one was first shown off just five months later in February 2018.

They’re not directly comparable, though, The Nokia 8 Sirocco is significantly more expensive, raising the ceiling of just how fancy Nokia’s new phones can get.

It costs £699 / AU$1,199, making it roughly $940 in a direct currency translation, though it’s not officially available in the US. The Nokia 8 Sirocco is not cheap by any standard, though some stores are already offering it at a slight discount if you shop around.

Key features

• Durable, stylish design
• 128GB of storage but no microSD card slot
• Dated chipset

At this price we have a right to expect some pretty special features. In some areas we get them, in others we don’t.

Design is a highlight. The Nokia 8 Sirocco has an impressive Gorilla Glass 5 and steel frame, with an eye-catching curved front. Few phones feel as expensive as this.

Not every part of the design is a hit, though. As the phone has a 16:9 screen rather than the now more popular 18:9 (or even 19:9) style, it already seems dated. There’s also no memory card slot or headphone jack, sure to grate with some of you.

128GB of storage should be enough for most, mind, and other extras include a rear fingerprint scanner, triple microphone array and wireless charging.

The Nokia 8 Sirocco performs well generally, but does not have a cutting-edge chipset. It uses 2016/2017’s Snapdragon 835 CPU instead of the newer Snapdragon 845. This may be fast enough for just about any purpose, but cheaper or similarly priced phones have the newer version, including the OnePlus 6 and LG G7 ThinQ.

Its camera also struggles a little against the best around. The Nokia 8 Sirocco has a high-quality 12MP main sensor with a 13MP secondary one for 2x zoom images.

This combination opens up more compositional scope, but doesn’t offer the best low-light or HDR images among top-end phones.

It’s all powered by a 3,260mAh battery with fast charging. While not as large as that of the Nokia 7 Plus, it’ll see you through a day’s use easily, with some charge left for the second day if you can’t plug-in overnight.

The Nokia 8 Sirocco doesn’t sink rivals with its hardware, and does not offer the value of the Nokia 7 Plus. In some ways it lags behind that cheaper phone.

A lot of the appeal therefore boils down to the pretty design.

Design

• Curved front and steel frame give the phone a high-end look and feel
• Seems a bit squat and a bit heavy

Next to every other top smartphone of 2018, the Nokia 8 Sirocco looks oddly squat. Perhaps our eyes have seen one too many 18:9 screen phones, but this model’s combination of a 16:9 screen and fairly small borders above and below the display leaves that impression.

That was the Nokia 8 Sirocco first impression vol. 1. Things change once you pick the phone up and start using it. Few seem as conspicuously made of glass and metal as this.

The Nokia 8 Sirocco is extremely dense, its glass rear feels much more like glass than many other phones with a glass and metal design. Some you could almost mistake for plastic. Not here.

A band of metal that sits around all its sides is stainless steel rather than aluminum, too. Steel is harder. And while you might not be able to tell this with your hands, the Nokia 8 Sirocco immediately feels like a luxury phone.

However, it’s also a little severe. Most current designs try to smooth out the seams between their metal and glass parts, but the beveled steel here sticks out a little.

We wouldn’t call these edges sharp, but they are far more noticeable than most. It’s Nokia saying “we spent a lot on this stuff, you’re sure as hell going to notice it, okay?”.

Steel also makes the Nokia 8 Sirocco a little heavy for its size. It’s 177g, the same as the OnePlus 6, which has a larger screen and is a good 15mm taller. It’s not truly heavy, though, so this ends up adding to the sense of high build quality rather than seeming like a burden.

There’s a glass fingerprint scanner on the back too. It could be contoured a little more and doesn’t let you bring up the apps or notification screens with a gesture, but is fast and reliable.

The Nokia 8 Sirocco’s curved front is probably the most alluring part of the design. Similar to the Samsung Galaxy S9, it gives the phone front-on contours that simply look great.

Both panes of glass use Gorilla Glass 5, which as of mid-2018 is the latest version. It’s a highly scratch-proof and shatter-resistant glass only normally used by expensive devices. Like this one.

Screen

• 5.5-inch screen with 534 pixels per inch
• P-OLED panel suffers from color shift
• Lacks customization options

The 5.5-inch 1440 x 2560 P-OLED screen is a bad match for these curves, though. Samsung’s latest OLED panels are just about perfect: great contrast, viewing angles, color and brightness.

We get an LG P-OLED panel instead here, as used in the Google Pixel 2 XL. Color shift is the issue.

At an angle, the Nokia 8 Sirocco screen’s whites turn blue. When you look at a website or, say, the white settings menu, the curved edges of the display appear blue rather than white.

We assume Nokia knows about this. The effect is pretty obvious. It’s likely a suitable Samsung OLED panel was not available, or not cost-effective, but this color shift spoils the screen's impact.

The Nokia 8 Sirocco’s screen is bright and color-saturated, but it also lacks the customization options common among high-end phones. You can’t tame the ultra-saturated reds, which make the YouTube logo look very bright.

For a pro-style calibration, the display also needs to be slightly warmer. Again, you can’t do this.

That said, we’re fairly happy with how the Nokia 8 Sirocco’s screen looks aside from the blue border issue. Oh, and that the 16:9 aspect will look more dated by the week.

Battery life

• 3,260mAh battery
• Easily lasts a day or more
• Supports fast and wireless charging

The Nokia 8 Sirocco has a 3,260mAh battery. It’s a lot smaller than the 3,800mAh of the Nokia 7 Plus, not least because this is also a smaller phone that is deliberately quite thin.

However, real world battery life is still perfectly sound. While not a class leader, we find the Nokia 8 Sirocco lasts a comfortable day and a half between charges. Its last 20% charge hangs on pretty well too.

After several hours of audio streaming, some social media use and a bit of internet browsing, we find the phone ends up with around 30% charge by the end of the day. That not bad at all.

For all the complaints we have about the P-OLED screen, it seems to be very efficient too. Playing a 90-minute video at maximum brightness takes just 12% off the battery level, beating most apart from class leaders like the Huawei P20 Pro.

The Nokia 8 Sirocco comes with a fast charger that outputs up to 15W to get you from flat to 50% charge in half an hour. As ever, the speed slows down after this, but you’ll get to 100% in under two hours.

Wireless charging is available too. Like most, it uses the Qi standard so will work with most third-party pads. You don’t get one in the box, though.

Camera

• Dual-lens camera offers 2x zoom
• Good pro mode and intuitive camera app
• Camera performance is solid but bettered by rivals

The original Nokia 8 from late 2017 had a rather uninspiring camera for a higher-end phone, using a dual 13MP rear sensor array. Nokia has improved this setup in the Sirocco, with two cameras much closer to those of its rivals.

There’s a 12MP sensor with large 1.4-micron sensor pixels, for better low-light sensitivity, and a secondary camera with a 2x zoom lens and 13MP sensor. Both use Zeiss-branded lenses.

In anything but poor lighting, the benefits of the zoom are real. We tried the 1x and 2x views shooting a bookcase from about 5 meters away, and the text on the books’ spines was much clearer at 2x.

However, its effectiveness is not on par with the Huawei P20 Pro or iPhone X. At night the compromises of the 2x camera’s slower f/2.6 lens and the lower-quality sensor are quite apparent, and telephoto images are slightly soft generally.

Take the Nokia 8 Sirocco out during the day and you can capture some lovely shots. The 12MP sensor on the back is clearly good, capable of capturing sharp, noise-free images with good color and some natural bokeh (background blur).

The camera app also works well. In most conditions there’s very little shutter lag, which gives you that sense of a more direct connection with the camera. It’s a tool that actually works, in other words.

It’s pleasantly plain too. While the camera app is Nokia’s own, it hasn’t gone for the kind of attention-grabbing AI and AR modes some other phone makers currently peddle. The zoom button, which switches between 1x and 2x views, is also handily very close to the shutter button. It feels very natural and intuitive in use.

You also get Nokia’s long-celebrated pro mode. This uses a set of dials to let you control shutter speed, exposure, ISO, focus and white balance.

It works well and, just like a DSLR or compact system camera, manually setting one parameter and leaving the Nokia 8 Sirocco to sort the rest feels good. Solid pro modes are nowhere near as rare as they used to be, though, so this no longer sets the phone apart.

That sums up the Nokia 8 Sirocco’s camera generally. It is good, but we’ve seen so much progress in this area even in the last couple of years that it takes more to excite at the price.

Some aspects of the Nokia 8 Sirocco’s shooting performance could be improved too. For example, its Auto HDR optimization is not the best around, beaten by the HTC U12 Plus and Google Pixel 2 XL. You’ll see some blown highlights in scenes, or too-dark foregrounds, and other phones at the price bring out the contours of clouds in bright skies more clearly.

Night shooting, while fairly solid, is not the best around either. Other top phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S9 make darker scenes appear brighter and clearer, and as the Nokia 8 Sirocco does not have optical image stabilization you do need to keep your hands pretty still to ensure a non-blurred shot.

On one evening we shot the Shard building in London with the Nokia 8 Sirocco. Despite deliberately framing the photo, two of the five images we captured had some evidence of handshake blur.

The Nokia 7 Plus shows this phone up too. It has similar hardware and shooting performance, but this seems much more impressive in a phone half the price.

They both share extras like Live Bokeh too. This is a mode that uses software to determine the background in your shot, and then blurs it out. It can come out with effective results, but also trips up a little more than the Huawei or Apple versions of this concept.

For video, the Nokia 8 Sirocco can shoot at up to 4K resolution, 30 frames per second. However, when you bump up the resolution from 1080p, you also lose out on software image stabilization, which is what makes handheld footage look smooth.

The OnePlus 6 offers stabilization (either software or hardware) at 1080p and 4K. We also noticed significant motion blur in the Nokia 8 Sirocco’s stabilized footage. It’s not a king of video, then, although its audio recording is better than most.

Nokia has put three AOP microphones in the 8 Sirocco to let it record ‘Ozo’ sound. The Nokia Ozo is a now-discontinued $45,000 360-degree camera for professionals, but here Ozo means a surround sound recording method.

It works fairly well, and the 'AOP' part of the microphone spec means they can handle very high levels of noise without distorting. We also like the ability to tweak the Ozo feature to record from the front, rear or all around, which is particularly handy if you’re at a gig or are recording yourself talking to the selfie camera.

This front camera has a surprisingly basic-sounding 5MP sensor. It’s not an ultra-low-end camera, as it has 1.4-micron sensor pixels. Your selfies don’t end up looking incredibly soft and mushy, as they would through the 'eyes' of some lower-end 5MP sensors, but its performance is still fairly poor at the price.

There’s no synthesized background blur for the front camera either.

Camera samples

Interface and reliability

• Stock version of Android Oreo
• Smooth general performance and no bloat

The Nokia 8 Sirocco runs a vanilla version of Android 8.0, much closer to Google’s own design than even the software used by the Moto G series. It’s Pixel-like.

This is because Nokia’s current phones are part of the Android One project. This is a Google love-in, a manufacturer accepting a much closer relationship, a compliance, than is the standard. However, there’s nothing wrong with it.

Android One means there’s no bloat in the Nokia 8 Sirocco. It just has one Nokia app, Nokia Mobile Care. This acts as a phone manual, and lets you talk to Nokia’s online help team if an issue arises.

The phone otherwise just has Google’s own app suite, letting you use the rest of the gigantic 128GB of storage for your own apps, games and photos. This is masses of storage, twice the amount the LG G7 ThinQ offers at a similar price.

General performance is great too. While some other Nokia phones have demonstrated using vanilla Android is no guarantee of this, the Nokia 8 Sirocco is smooth and quick.

We are at a point where some of you may actually prefer a custom interface to the default Android look, though. Manufacturer UIs are almost universally far more customizable, allowing themes, along with the altering of app grid layouts and lock screens.

The Nokia 8 Sirocco’s white paper-style apps menu also looks a little stiff and serious next to what you get with a Huawei or Samsung phone. Why so serious, Google?

However, the look here is clean, consistent and will not offend anyone’s tastes.

Movies and games

• Can handle games well and has lots of storage space
• Disappointing speaker and no headphone port

As it has a powerful chipset and masses of internal storage, the Nokia 8 Sirocco has a clear advantage over most phones as a media and gaming machine. It plays high-end games like PUBG and Asphalt 8 extremely well, and you can fit just about every recent high-profile game into the Sirocco without running out of space.

The vivid, high-contrast OLED screen also makes their visuals look great, and punchy as anything. For games that have mostly light colors, you may notice the color shift blue tint in the display’s curves, but to be honest we promptly forget about it after just a few seconds while playing.

After using several 18:9 phones recently, switching to this one does highlight the benefits of the now-standard ultra-wide (or long) display. When playing a console-like game with virtual gamepad controls, it feels a little like your thumbs encroach on the Nokia 8 Sirocco's play area, where 18:9 has so much more lateral space this is just not an issue.

The Nokia 8 Sirocco’s speaker is also a disappointment. While fairly loud, it’s surprisingly thin and harsh, and quite hard on the ear at high volumes.

Samsung didn’t make a big fuss about the speakers on its Galaxy S9, but they are far chunkier-sounding and a much more pleasant listen.

There’s also no headphone jack here, which is always an annoyance. This means you have to either use the bundled USB-C headphones, a wireless pair or buy a USB-C to 3.5mm adaptor.

The Nokia 8 Sirocco is a good gaming phone, like every high-end model. But it is not nearly the best you can get for this sort of money.

Video-watching is a little different, because the display is actually the same shape as quite a lot of streamed content. If a show was made for TV, it’ll likely fit the Nokia 8 Sirocco's screen pixel-for-pixel. Watching a movie that was shown in cinemas? Ratios like 2.35:1 Anamorphic will still benefit from the longer or wider display other phones have.

And, again, brighter-looking scenes will also be affected by the color shift issue of the P-OLED panel.

Performance and benchmarks

• Older Snapdragon 835 chipset
• Solid Geekbench scores, but lower than rivals

While the Nokia 8 Sirocco has a hefty 6GB of RAM, in certain other areas the phone has just slightly problematic, or slightly dated, technology. This is true of the chipset. It has a Snapdragon 835, which is 2017's Qualcomm flagship phone chipset.

Several phones at this price, including the OnePlus 6 and LG G7 ThinQ, use the newer Snapdragon 845 instead. What’s the difference?

The Snapdragon 845 has newer Kryo cores, a faster integrated 4G modem and a much more powerful Adreno 630 GPU. We don’t get any of these in the Nokia 8 Sirocco.

The Snapdragon 835 is still very powerful, earning 6,286 points in Geekbench 4. However, that a recently released phone at such a high price uses an unmistakably old chipset is disappointing. Phones with the Snapdragon 845 tend to score 8,800-9,000 in Geekbench 4.

Add this to the 16:9 screen and the Nokia 8 Sirocco starts to seem like a phone that was actually meant to be released six months earlier, at least.

Verdict

Look at the Nokia 8 Sirocco and you might guess its designers spent so long agonizing over its curves and glassy bits that by the time the phone was ready, the rest of the world had moved on. Some parts are a little dated.

If you’re not enchanted by its design, and you may well be, the Nokia 7 Plus seems better value.

There are a few deeper tech issues too. The Nokia 8 Sirocco has a slightly dated chipset and the phone’s curved front highlights the technical shortcomings of its P-OLED screen.

It doesn’t do itself any favors and recommending it over phones of superior value like the OnePlus 6 is difficult. However, it has its own set of charms.

Who's this for?

The Nokia 8 Sirocco suits those after a phone that looks and feels expensive and, of course, Nokia loyalists.

Should you buy it?

If you don’t fall in love with its stripped-back software and the minutiae of its design, there are too many better-value options out there.

The Nokia 8 Sirocco proves Nokia has engineers who know how to make a luxury phone, but the tech is a little behind in too many areas to keep up with the competition.

First reviewed: June 2018

There are lots of strong alternatives to the Nokia 8 Sirocco. Consider one of the following three phones instead:

OnePlus 6

At least £200/$300 cheaper than the Nokia 8 Sirocco, the OnePlus 6 is much better value. And despite the lower price you get a more powerful chipset, a larger screen and a stabilized camera that works a little better at night.

There’s no true 2x zoom here, it’s digital. And in-hand the OnePlus is friendlier, without the imposing hard and dense feel of the Sirocco. But in terms of what you get for your money, the winner is clear. It’s the OnePlus 6.

• Read our full OnePlus 6 review

Nokia 7 Plus

Not too bothered about the Sirocco’s glamorous design? The Nokia 7 Plus is worth looking at. It’s 2.5mm wider but that gets you an extra 0.5 inches of screen space thanks to the 18:9 screen.

While it has a mid-tier chipset, it’s a good one. The Snapdragon 660 is newer than the Sirocco’s Snapdragon 835 and has enough power to keep the phone ticking along nicely.

Their rear cameras are extremely similar and the front one here is actually much higher-res: 16MP instead of five. The Nokia 7 Plus is a class below in most respects, but better value overall.

• Read our full Nokia 7 Plus review

HTC U12 Plus

The latest big-screen HTC phone has a few more out-there ideas than the Nokia 8 Sirocco. It has squeezy sides and buttons that don’t click in. They’re just pressure sensitive and you get a haptic response on a press.

We’re not huge fans of these parts, and the design is less dynamic than Nokia’s. However, it has a newer Snapdragon 845 chipset and an 18:9 aspect screen, to which we’re already accustomed. The HTC also has smarter camera HDR processing, which can produce seriously attractive results.

• Read our hands on HTC U12 Plus review

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