Huawei Nova 8i Global Rollout Continues, Launches in New Markets with an Edgeless Screen & 66W Charging

The global rollout of Huawei Nova 7i's successor continues as the latest Nova series lands in Europe. The phone came out in July this year, and it’s now available in Germany (among other markets.) We’ll review what the Nova 8i has to offer.

The Huawei Nova 8i sports a very sleek design, inspired by the flagship Huawei Mate 30. We’re looking at the similarly chamfered shell edges, ring-shaped camera housing, and minimalist bezels. A matrix of four lenses is arranged inside the camera island. You can pick the body in Moonlight Silver and Starry Black shades.

Huawei has pushed back the screen bezel to create an extraordinary 94.7% screen-to-body ratio. This remarkable aesthetic is somewhat undercut by the floating pill-shaped cutout found on the display. It’s a 6.67” IPS panel that delivers a 1080P resolution. 

The wide hole punch on the new addition to the Huawei price list contains a single 16MP front camera. You would expect the second sensor to be an ultra-wide selfie lens, but it's an unspecified module. The quad-camera on the back uses an array of 64 MP wide, 8MP ultra-wide, and two 2MP depth and macro lenses.

Inside the Huawei Nova 8i, the entry-level Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 powers everything. It’s an 11nm chip that came out in 2020. EMUI 11 (built on Android 10) runs on this platform without support for Google services. You get 8GB of memory and 128GB of internal storage. 

What the Nova 8i lacks in raw performance, it makes up for some of it with the blazing-fast 66W SuperCharge technology. The power brick in the box is advertised to top-up the 4300 mAh battery in just 38 minutes. It starts at €349 as prices in Europe are always on the higher side.