Nokia 8 gets Android 8.1 beta

Nokia is still not out of the rough waters, but it looks like the HMD Global-owned brand is doing a lot of things right these days. Keeping the handsets released so far up to date as promised is one of these things.

About two months ago, a public build of Android 8.0 Oreo reached the Nokia 8, and now the company is pushing a beta for the minor 8.1 update. According to HMD Global's Chief Product Officer Juho Sarvikas, the new firmware comes with "a host of new features" but he only mentioned a specific one: the hamburger emoji fix that finally puts the cheese back on top of the patty.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 835-powered Nokia 8 has been praised for its ruggedness, but its main camera setup did not get so lucky. In fact, it was considered to belong a few years in the past due to the performance it provided when being tested by DxOMark. Since the camera setup features an optical image stabilizer and two 13 MP sensors with an aperture of f/2.0, we hope that the mobile photography performance of this handset will improve a lot in the next months.

In the end, we should mention that the public Android 8.1 release for the Nokia 8 has no launch date yet, so we can only hope. However, we think that Nokia 8 users will get the non-beta Android 8.1 by the end of February.