Nokia 8 with Oreo onboard hits Geekbench and GFXBench

The Nokia 8 is the first true flagship released by this iconic brand since the Finnish company HMD Global acquired the Nokia-branded feature phone business from Microsoft Mobile. This premium handset made its debut in August when it became available in Finland. Last week, Germany and Australia became the next two markets to receive it. Unfortunately, its arrival to the US and China is still uncertain.

HMD Global already confirmed that all its smartphones will receive Android Oreo, but they did not mention any launch date. However, since the MediaTek-powered Nokia 3 is expected to require special attention due to its chipset, the battle for the first Nokia smartphone to receive the Oreo update will be fought between the Nokia 5, the Nokia 6, and the Nokia 8.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 835-powered Nokia 8 currently runs Android 7.1.1 Nougat, but the Android 8.0 update might become available soon, reveal two recent benchmark listings that surfaced on Geekbench and GFXBench. While this is not an official confirmation, it definitely increases the probability to see the Nokia 8 emerge as the first Nokia smartphone to receive the latest major update to Google's mobile operating system.

Android 8.0 Oreo was released to the public less than a month ago, on August 21. Although there are no radical changes to the user interface, the eighth major version of this mobile operating system made by Google features a picture-in-picture mode and improved app notifications, as well as the usual security and performance improvements. While the 60 new emojis might not be a strong reason to upgrade, the solid boot time improvement over Android 7.1.2 Nougat alone is enough to consider updating a handset's software environment.

If the Nokia 8 launches in the US, we expect its price to fall around the US$600 mark. HMD Global only needs to launch it at the right time, and it looks like an alliance with a major local carrier would surely help.