Nova 8: Huawei Malaysia’s new mid-range phone lacks 5G and it’s priced at RM1,899

The Huawei Nova 8 has officially arrived in Malaysia a month after the company introduced the Nova 8i. It is Huawei’s latest mid-range smartphone that packs a 90Hz OLED display, a quad-camera setup with a 64MP main camera and it supports 66W fast-charging.

Pricing and availability

The Huawei Nova 8 with 8GB RAM and 128GB of storage is officially priced at RM1,899. As an introductory offer, Huawei is providing 1 month Huawei Cloud 200GB storage, exclusive vouchers and an entertainment gift package.

If you’re interested, you can buy it online via the official Huawei Online Store as well as Lazada and Shopee. The device is only available in one colour option called Blush Gold.

Hardware Specs

In terms of specs, the Nova 8 features a 6.57″ Full HD+ curved OLED display that pushes a 90Hz refresh rate. Under the hood, it runs on a Kirin 820E processor mated to 8GB of RAM and has 128GB of internal storage.

In the camera department, the Nova 8 gets a quad-camera setup and the camera bump design looks quite similar to the Mi 10 T. It has a 64MP main camera, an 8MP ultra-wide-angle shooter, a 2MP depth camera and a 2MP macro shooter. For selfies, the Nova 8 has a 32MP selfie camera up front that sits in a punch-hole on the display.

Powering the device is a rather modest 3,800mAh battery and if you need to charge it up quickly, it supports Huawei’s 65W SuperCharge via USB-C. Huawei claims that you can get a 60% charge in just 15 minutes.

Besides the lack of Google Mobile Services, the Nova 8 doesn’t even support 5G which is quite a shame. This is a 4G LTE device and it supports 5GHz 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 5.0 and has NFC. Out of the box it runs on EMUI 12 and you can discover apps through the Huawei AppGallery.

For the same retail price tag, you can get the Samsung Galaxy A52 5G which offers a 120Hz AMOLED display, a Snapdragon 750 5G SoC, 256GB of storage and a larger 4,500mAh battery. On top of that, the Galaxy A52 5G also has access to Google Mobile Services including Google Play Store and it even comes with IP67-rated dust and water resistance.