[Nokia 8 Guides, News, & Discussion] dbpm1:
If there is a soul from HMD-Global/Nokia reading this forum, you, XDA fellow may have, just as I'm having now, a moment to share your thoughts and experiences with this sometimes loved sometimes hated device...

First step was acquiring the phone, ever since I heard the old and famous Nokia was making a comeback I couldn't wait to grab my own piece of the fun but damn that was hard to get!

Since the holder of the manufacturing rights would not then, and still not to this date, sell it in this part of the globe (Brazil to be exact) I had to handle it somehow.

Just out of nothing in March 2018 I saw a friend on vacation in Sweden, posting pics on social media bragging about the weather there. That was my chance!

So I sent him the money to buy two phones, one blue(mine) another silver(for my father) and after a few days I had them. In my hands. The freaking legendary phone resurfaced!

Well that was my first thought after taking it from the brand new box.. Booted it for the first time and there was the anywhere knowable startup tone from some twenty years ago again!

Got an Oreo 8.0 stock version but some bugs too, like the ever unable to maintain connection Bluetooth or the horrible ghosted/blurred LCD if used above 20% brightness.

No problem I thought, just a few hours driving it stock it was time to really make it my own! Let's get down to XDA!

Bam, almost nothing was available at the time because HMD had shipped it with a locked bootloader! Yay a piece of confidence in it was lost that day..

But there was this dude, whose name its written within the stars, he was asking for IMEI's to FREELY calculate the unlock keys with a method that he probably devised with knowledge obtained by [MENTION=7601808]hikari_calyx[/MENTION]

I knew that was a shady thing around here (still is! don't post your IMEI online!) but hey that was the only option available back then.

After a couple of hours I got the response and followed the instructions and that was it, the blue one was unlocked! I hurried and asked my father to send me his IMEI so I could unlock his silver TA-1004 (he never had the time to, more on that later) and again after a few moments came in the second unlock key. A GOOD SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE OEM. FREE. TIMES TWO. Can you believe it?

Now that I had the bootloader unlocked the fun was about to begin or so I thought.. Back then and even now not a single developer released a fullblown custom rom for the Nokia 8. Well not even an pached up customized version of the original.

All of that may be because of the intended audience the OEM expected to have, white collar executives wanting a secure and steady device. HMD sacrificed a much broader userbase on this premise. They held back the official bootloader unlock method for ages and never properly released the source code for it.

Then a few days after the unofficial unlock in early April [MENTION=3424660]2WildFirE[/MENTION] released the first working TWRP! That was great because I just learned about the new A/B partition method and briefly read about Magisk's systemless root.

That was it, no custom rom but I could make it the way I wanted using GravityBox and a whole bunch of Magisk and Xposed modules!

The blue one went on and i kept it upgraded on all security patches until December 2018 because on January 2019 Pie 9.0 was brutally updated with little to no warning and after the reboot there was no root and everything else that came with it.

There was no possible way to downgrade and without root no way to fully back it up. Just saved the most important things and rolled back to 8.0 then gradually one by one installed the monthly security patches.

Did I mention that for each month when you had an security patch available you'd have to flash a new patched by yourself boot image or the wifi would not work? For a couple of months you had to do it by hand, but [MENTION=454574]bidhata[/MENTION] was making it easier by sharing pre-rooted images!

There was no official Xposed or even GravityBox available for Pie then so I would stick to the last December 8.1 patch.

To this day the blue TA-1004 is in one single piece without much damage because I'm generally careful with my phones but I couldn't tell the same about the silver one because its dormant in many pieces in a box after my old man dropped it off the counter with the back of the phone on hard concrete. The thing blew in multiple shards of glass, never to be fixed because of the stratospheric prices for a dubious LCD replacement.

It sits there, hoping to live again with its almost new battery or maybe its mainboard on the blue one, that blue Nokia 8 that stays now in my office desk even after almost two years of constant charging cycles is beginning to show up signs of wear, staying off the charger no more than 4 to 5 hours with moderate use as a wifi SIP phone only.

From time to time I check the Nokia 8 forum to see if there is some hope, have noticed that [MENTION=9309516]THMSP[/MENTION] has achieved an awesome method (with a great name btw) to use project treble roms but I had it enough already to keep trying banging my head into it.

Since last November I bought a Xiaomi Mi 9 (now updated with a custom rom without all of that "official" embedded crappy datamining bloatware) that I effortlessly typed this from and even with the two weeks time waiting to unlock it, the rooting experience and the multitude of available custom roms made the blue Nokia 8 dull as a brick phone of the past.

So well this is my rant doubling as an warning to all of you manufacturers and OEMs over there. The moral of all this is, if you want your pretty little phone to be held in grace DO release it unlocked or with a possible way to unlock and provide working source code just as all the big players do.

Or else you may end up with a four/five (or how many?) camera phone with the same processor from the past year's flagship that has not achieved desired selling numbers, that even with the price drops stays on storage or display at stores or worse, be know to be the one with a yellow BANANA(!) phone design repurposed from a 1990's era.