See how one concept of the Nokia 9.2 handles the rear-camera setup

HMD Global, the company that owns the license allowing it to produce Nokia branded smartphones, is supposedly working on getting its next flagship model ready to be unveiled. It is not certain when this will take place and there is some talk of a fall unveiling. While it might not carry the Nokia 9.2 name when released, that is apparently what HMD Global is calling the phone at this moment.

A concept released by designer Ben Geskin via a tweet imagines that the Nokia 9.2 will replace the five-camera setup found on the back of the Nokia 9 PureView with a quad-camera setup. The latter would be housed in a circular camera module and HMD would be expexcted once again to employ Zeiss optics. The image shows a tall and thin display with extremely razor thins bezels; without a punch-hole or notch on the screen, the handset's 32MP selfie camera would be found under the display.

Rumored specs include a Gorilla Glass 6 protected 5.99-inch plastic OLED "PureDisplay" with a QHD+ resolution. Powering the phone should be the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform. The Nokia 9.2 is expected to feature 6GB or 8GB of memory paired with 128GB or 256GB of internal storage, and an in-screen fingerprint scanner is said to be onboard. The phone will reportedly be equipped with a 3500mAh battery which seems light for a device offering 5G connectivity.

The four-cameras on the back of the phone are rumored to weigh in at 13MP. While this doesn't guarantee that they will work the same way as the five 12MP cameras on the Nokia 9 PureView, it doesn't rule it out either. Unlike most phones with multiple cameras in the back that allow the user to choose from different cameras (wide, ultra-wide, or telephoto for example), the five cameras on the Nokia 9 PureView all fire together at the same time. With a pair of RGB sensors (to grab data related to colors) and three monochrome sensors (to collect information related to lights and shadows), HMD basically replaced an HDR toggle with this system. Considering the criticism leveled at Google for not including an ultra-wide camera with the Pixel 4 line, we have to wonder whether HMD will give users of the new phone a way to choose between different lenses.

The Nokia 9 PureView was something of a disappointment when it was released last year. In the states, after a promotional period that took $100 off of the price, the phone was available for $699. For some reason though, HMD decided to run the device on the previous year's Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform which surely helped the handset sell for a lower price than it might have otherwise. But there were plenty of issues out of the box, especially with sluggish processing of photographs. For a camera-centric device, this could not stand and last summer a major update was pushed out. Before the update, we had published our review of the phone and gave it a rating of 4.0 out of a possible 10.0.

We can only hope that HMD Global has taken the time to see where it might have gone wrong with the Nokia 9 PureView and plans to make the appropriate changes for the sequel. Everywhere you turn, companies like Apple, Samsung, and Huawei have been making improvements to the cameras on their flagship phone. Nokia, which once had a fantastic reputation for smartphone photography, needs to get its name back into this conversation for the PureView moniker to mean anything in 2020 and beyond. If the phone is delayed until this fall, HMD Global has some hard work to do.

Just a reminder: the image that accompanies this story is Benjamin Geskin's concept of the Nokia 9.2 and is not a render.