From the intro to Kerwin's piece:
The Nokia 9 PureView embodies HMD Global’s capability in the higher-end market. It has all the big names tied to it, featuring a collaboration with some of the biggest companies in the tech world. There was Nokia’s frequent collaborator, Carl Zeiss AG, then Google and its Android One team, and some minor help from Adobe. There was also the then-independent startup, Light, coming in with some crazy innovative camera ideas we have never seen on a smartphone before.
The smartphone has all the right recipes for success but ultimately suffers from its own complexities. We didn’t know how much this cost HMD Global, but it is bonkers how the company changed the way they make their devices since then.
Some people who owned the Nokia 9 PureView admit that it has issues from the get-go. And while some of it has been remedied via a software update, some of the more glaring ones remain to this day. It was a major compromise for the consumers who bought the device with some Nokia flagship expectations. But the inconsistencies in user experience, paired with the sudden neglect from its developers, and Light eventually halting its business for mobile imaging, caused a bit of a stir, not just for the users, but also within the whole Nokia community. What was left was the promise of Android One which was later proven to be false hope. Questions about HMD Global’s claims of honesty quickly arose, criticizing its famed tagline which partly reads “secure, and up-to-date”.
You can read the whole thing here.
Regardless of other hardware failings, there was so much possibility in the Nokia 9 PureView's unique camera layout - little of which was actually deployed. In particular, I'd have liked to have seen the parallax layout of cameras used to provide good software zoom up to, I estimate, 5x. But the algorithms simply never went 'there'.
For more on the Nokia 9 PureView from my own lips, see my original video review from 2019: