The Nokia 6 (2018) arrives with a big spec upgrade and on-screen buttons

For now it's China only, but it should eventually make it to the rest of the world.

HMD is launching a second generation of the Nokia 6. Compared to the old Nokia 6, a lot has changed. There's a bigger-than-you'd-expect spec boost and a more modern design. The good things are still the same, though—it's still made of metal, and it still costs about $230.

First, the specs: the Nokia 6 has been upgraded to a full tier higher in Qualcomm's SoC lineup—the 2017 version has a low-end Snapdragon 430, while this 2018 version ships with a more mid-range Snapdragon 630. For the same price, that's a great upgrade. You also get one more gigabyte of RAM in the base version, which is now up to 4GB. The new Nokia 6 is also upgrading from micro USB to the newer, reversible USB-C standard.

The rest of the specs are pretty much the same. There's still a 5.5-inch, 1080p IPS LCD, a 3,000mAH battery, and a baseline of 32GB of storage with expansion via a MicroSD slot. There's also a 64GB version available for $260. The Nokia 6 still has a headphone jack, but the speakers have—on paper at least—been downgraded from two speakers to one. Unfortunately the OS hasn't changed much, either: the new Nokia 6 is running an old version of Android, 7.1.1, with an upgrade to "Android 8.0 Oreo" (still not the latest version of Android!) promised at some nebulous point in the future.
The camera specs seem exactly the same as last year, with a 16MP, 1.0µm, f/2, rear camera and an 8MP 1.12µm, f/2, front camera. One fun new feature is the "dual view" camera, which can snap a picture from the front and back sensors at the same time and will stitch the two pictures together, side by side. HMD also proudly declares "No camera bump" in the spec sheet.

On the design side of things, the button and fingerprint reader arrangement is new. The old Nokia 6 had capacitive buttons painted onto the front of the device, along with a center-mounted front fingerprint reader. The 2018 Nokia 6 goes for a more modern setup, with on-screen navigation buttons and a rear fingerprint reader, just like all the flagship phones. HMD's Photoshoppers neglected to put these on-screen buttons in some of the press images, but they did made it to one or two of them.
For now, the 2018 Nokia 6 is only launching in China. Preorders are live now, and the device ships January 10. If HMD's rollout is anything like the old Nokia 6, the phone will eventually make it to the rest of the world, including the US. Last year, the Nokia 6 took six months to make it from China to the US, but that was HMD's first ever Nokia phone. Hopefully the company is a little quicker this time around.