Today Huawei announced the brand new Nova 5 series of smartphones. The company released the new Nova 5, Nova 5 Pro and Nova 5i in China with availability later this month. The new Nova 5 and 5 Pro are particularly interesting because they now represent Huawei’s lowest priced devices with OLED displays, also featuring high-end cameras and SoC options.

Huawei Nova 5 Series
  Nova 5 Nova 5 Pro
SoC HiSilicon Kirin 810

2x Cortex-A76 @ 2.23 GHz
6x Cortex-A55 @ 1.88 GHz


Mali G52MP6 @ 820MHz
HiSilicon Kirin 980

2x Cortex-A76 @ 2.60 GHz
2x Cortex-A76 @ 1.92 GHz
4x Cortex-A55 @ 1.80 GHz

Mali G76MP10 @ 720MHz
DRAM 8GB LPDDR4X
Storage 128 / 256GB
Display 6.39" OLED
2340 x 1080 (19.5:9)
Size Height 157.4 mm
Width 74.8 mm
Depth 7.33 mm
Weight 171 grams
Battery Capacity 3500mAh (Typical)
3400mAh (Rated)

40W Charging
Wireless Charging -
Rear Cameras
Main 48MP (IMX586 or GM1)
0.8µm pixels (1.6µm 4:1 12MP binning)

f/1.8 lens
no OIS?
Telephoto -
Wide 16MP f/2.2
117° Ultra wide angle 
17mm equivl. FL
Extra 2MP F/2.4 macro module
+
2MP F/2.4 depth module
Front Camera 32MP f/2.0
I/O USB-C
no headphone jack (3.5mm adapter included)
Wireless (local) 802.11ac Wave 2 Wi-Fi
Bluetooth 5.0 LE
Other Features Under-screen Fingerprint Sensor
Dual-SIM Dual nanoSIM
Colours Green, Purple, Black
Orange (Pro only)
Launch Price 8+128GB: ¥2799 (~$407) 8+128GB: ¥2999 (~$436)
8+256GB: ¥3339 (~$485)

The new Nova 5 and Nova 5 Pro are interesting phones because they are essentially the same device, with the peculiarity of having different SoC options: The Nova 5 in particular is the first phone to now introduce the new Kirin 810 chipset. The new chip features a combination of 2x Cortex A76 CPUs at up to 2.23GHz and 6x Cortex A55’s at 1.88GHz. In terms of GPU, Huawei has opted for a Mali-G52MP6 running at 820MHz. It looks like the Kirin 810 is extremely well positioned to compete against Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 730 SoC which was announced just back in April.

The Nova 5 Pro comes with the well-known Kirin 980 chipset, which has been powered Huawei and Honor high-end devices since last autumn.

As mentioned, the key feature of the new Nova 5’s is that they’re Huawei’s first OLED devices at this price range. The phones come with a 6.39” panel with a resolution of 2340 x 1080 (19.5:9 aspect ratio). The phones also sport an under-screen optical fingerprint scanner.

In terms of overall design, it’s a very familiar look, and sports the modern bezel-less design with a teardrop camera notch. This camera is a 32MP unit with an f/2.0 aperture, the same we saw on the Honor 20 & Pro.

The phone is also characterized by a relatively slim design coming in at only 7.33mm. The 171g phone still manages to sport a 3500mAh (typical) battery.

In the camera department, the phone is well equipped and seems to feature the same Sony IMX586 sensor introduced in the View20 and sported in the Honor 20 series. The 48MP sensor comes with an f/1.8 lens, and it seems that it does lack OIS as Huawei doesn’t mention it in the specifications.

The second camera module is a 16MP f/2.2 lens, again, something we saw in the smaller P30 and also in the Honor 20. Both main and wide cameras resulted in very competitive shots in our hands-on review of the Honor 20 as well as the more expansive testing in the OnePlus 7 Pro review comparison, so we expect the Nova 5’s to perform just as well.

The oddity here is that Huawei features two further modules: A 2MP macro lens, and a 2MP depth sensor. Unfortunately the macro lens was a bit disappointing in the Honor 20 Pro, so we don’t have high expectation of it here. The depth module makes portrait shots possible as the phone lacks a telephoto lens.

Finally, the phone has no headphone jack, but Huawei provides the accompanying adapter along with headphones in the box.

The regular Nova 5 comes in a 8+128GB configuration for RMB2799 (~407USD) while the 5 Pro comes with 8+128GB at RMB2999 (~436USD) and 8+256GB at RMB3339 (~485USD). The phones come in four different colours, although the interesting orange version is exclusive to the Pro variant. The phones are current available for pre-order in China. We do not have any information about Huawei’s plans for the phone in western markets for the time being.

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Source: Vmall

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  • ZolaIII - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link

    It's a single cluster 128 ALU Adreno vs 144 (6x 24) Mali G52 MP6. Normalise Adreno to 0.7 mali still has 17% higher clocks so it's 180 vs 240. What I really want to see is performance per wat comparation.
  • levizx - Friday, June 21, 2019 - link

    400-450GFLOPS? In your dream, maybe. It has ~130GFLOPS.
  • levizx - Friday, June 21, 2019 - link

    I misread, 130-160GFLOPS is for Adreno 616. 618 is closer to 160-200GFLOPS
  • Wardrive86 - Friday, June 21, 2019 - link

    You undercut the compute performance of Adreno GPUs severely. The Adreno 506 is a 130ish Gflop GPU, so was the Adreno 330(their performance was greatly different). The 616 is at least double that. Compute is not the only metric in gaming/benchmarks. All of these GPUs have different amounts of memory bandwidth, cache, texture units, ROPs, CPU configurations, etc.
  • Kickasser - Saturday, June 22, 2019 - link

    How come?
    Adreno 540 has 567 Gflops as written on Wikipedia; either you guys are horribly wrong or Wikipedia has totally erred calculations...
  • Wardrive86 - Saturday, June 22, 2019 - link

    Wikipedia is wrong, that article has been edited so many times. The Adreno 540 has 256 Alus running from 670-710 mhz. FMA Gflops are from 343 - 364 GFlops
  • YouInspireMe - Friday, June 21, 2019 - link

    As if the back isn't busy enough with 4 cameras and a sensor they actually printed an image of 4 more cameras on the back
  • YouInspireMe - Friday, June 21, 2019 - link

    And spelled out that it has 4 cameras also
  • kpb321 - Friday, June 21, 2019 - link

    The ~$30 to upgrade to the Pro seems like a really good deal. Faster CPU, and what should be a faster and probably move efficient GPU seems well worth it.
  • 0iron - Sunday, June 23, 2019 - link

    Yes, I think $30 represent SoC pricing different between those two. $50 to double the storage is reasonable price too.

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