At MWC, Nokia has announced the 808 PureView, a Symbian powered phone with a massive 41MP camera. It’s been said in the past, ‘never judge a camera by its megapixels’, but here we might have to make an exception.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgdqobgzb0E

With 41MP and classic Carl Zeiss optics, you can do some awesome stuff that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise with a smartphone camera. You probably won’t want to simply snap 41MP photos (though I hope that’s an option), which would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 7728×5368 resolution, however, such a huge sensor allows you to have a useful digital zoom that doesn’t deteriorate the quality of the photo or video. Nokia says that they’ve tried to work costly and complicated analog zoom mechanisms into smartphones and found that it simply wasn’t practical. In addition to high quality digital zoom, oversampling is used in which all of the extra pixels better inform individual pixels of what color and luminosity they should be; this increases sharpness and reduces noise, and the result is a standard 5MP photo. If you’re a camera buff and want to get into the technical details, Nokia has a whitepaper for the PureView technology which gets down to the specifics.

All Things Digital has a nice concise piece about PureView in which Nokia says they’ve been working on the technology in secret for 5 years.

While the 808 PureView is a Symbian powered phone, Nokia says that the technology will eventually find its way into the Windows Phone 7 platform. Nokia has an 808 PureView micro-site available here which gives a good high-level rundown of the advantages of the technology. You can see sample shots taken with the 808 PureView here as well.

I’ve seen no indication of a Nokia 808 PureView release date or price at this point, and it’s doubtful that you’ll ever be able to get your hands on it in the states — until the technology hits Windows Phone 7, that is.