Two possible variants of the Nokia 9 flagship have been certified by the EA Union in the first half of May, as evidenced by a new set of documents obtained by industry sources on Friday. The devices were submitted for certification by HMD Global, a Finnish consumer electronics company that shares the rights to manufacture Nokia-branded devices with Foxconn-owned FIH Mobile. The two handsets certified by the agency are bearing the model numbers TA-1012 and TA-1004, the latter one of which has already been spotted online, having been listed in the database of popular mobile benchmarking tool Geekbench early last week.
Industry watchers are speculating that the newly uncovered existence of another model of Nokia’s flagship points at the fact that the company is looking to release both a single-SIM and dual-SIM variant of the handset. Following that logic, it’s possible that the TA-1004 is a single-SIM model of the Nokia 9 while the TA-1012 denotes a dual-SIM version of the device. Several HMD Global-made handsets were previously certified in Russia where telecommunications regulators tested and approved handsets bearing the model numbers TA-1005, TA-1007, TA-1013, TA-1029, and the TA-1040. While it’s possible that the TA-1005 denotes the upcoming Nokia flagship, no other details on the matter have yet been provided by industry insiders.
Even though recent reports indicated that the upcoming high-end Nokia device will be marketed as the Nokia 9, it’s also possible that the company opts to release it as either the Nokia 7 or Nokia 8 as all three of these names have previously been trademarked in Europe by the Finnish phone maker. Regardless, the first Nokia-branded premium handset in the brand’s post-Microsoft era is said to be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 system-on-chip (SoC) and as much as 8GB of RAM, in addition to featuring a dual-lens camera setup consisting of two 13-megapixel sensors on its rear panel. The phone is also expected to run Android 7.1.1 Nougat out of the box, with its software being essentially stock Android, as HMD Global previously confirmed that it decided against developing a robust mobile software suite for its new devices. More details on the availability of the Nokia 9 should follow in the coming months.