Nokia’s press conference at Mobile World Congress may have been a bit short on surprises – thanks in no small part to the many, many leaks that we’ve seen recently – but it did still manage to raise a few eyebrows when it announced the new handset powered by its Belle operating system (formerly known as Symbian).
There have been numerous rumours of a successor to Nokia’s N8, which wowed the world and won huge praise for its excellent camera. Nokia didn’t disappoint today, when it announced its new 808 PureView handset, with a 41MP camera. Yes, that’s right: a forty-one megapixel camera.
This is the first device featuring what Nokia calls its ‘PureView imaging technologies’, which are essentially a combination of the high-quality Carl Zeiss optics that we all know and love, high-resolution sensors and sophisticated software. Capable of taking pics of up to 38MP resolution, the camera will “capture seven pixels of information, condensing into one pixel for the sharpest images imaginable”.
The 41MP sensor captures the image, and packs it down into smaller ultra-detailed images, that can be zoomed and cropped with minimal loss of definition. Nokia also claims that the 808 offers superior low-light performance (although there’s a xenon flash when needed), while the camera can handle 1080p Full HD video recording and playback. Video can be played back on a larger display via the handset’s HDMI port, while the 808 also features Dolby Digital Plus support.
Available in three colours (red, black and white), the 808 PureView has a 4” ClearBlack AMOLED screen, protected with Gorilla Glass, although its resolution is fairly feeble (nHD, or 360x640px). There’s 16GB of storage on board too, which can be expanded up to 48GB with microSD cards.
But the big question is that of why this technology isn’t been rolled out on Nokia’s new Windows Phones. During a short Q&A after the announcement, a Nokia manager stated that the Pureview imaging technology has been in development “for some time”, before confirming that the company is “planning to bring this technology to other devices in our future portfolio”.
No 41MP cameras on Nokia Windows Phones anytime soon then, but they’ll hopefully arrive soon enough. The 808 PureView is expected in May, and Nokia says it will cost around €450 EUR ($605 USD / £381 GBP) in Europe without a contract when it arrives.