The Nokia 808 Pure View arrived to mess up my plans for the day. Thanks Nokia!

It’s out of the box and doing updates as I type. I haven’t even set the clock or taken a picture yet – how frustrating!

As I took it out of the box there was one overbearing first impression that I really hope doesn’t affect the way I use the Nokia 808  – it’s big and heavy, although it rests nicely in the hands. It’s plastic too but that helps even more to ensure the phone stays put in the hands. The bigger screen and lower pixel density over the N8 (remember I’m coming off nearly 2 years of ‘testing’ the N8) lends itself to thumb typing in landscape quite well and the slight speed-up over the N8 is immediately noticeable. The Micro-SIM requirement was annoying but we’re nearly up and running.

The Nokia 808 PureView is here for long-term testing so you’ll see occasional posts and videos from me about various features. Obviously I’ll be looking closely at the photography aspect and comparing it to other cameras I have around here.

The N8 is powered down and sits next to my Nokia N82 – four years of Nokia cameraphone usage. I wonder if the 808 will bring that to six years of usage?

Thanks to Nokia UK I’ll be kicking off the re-launch of HiBlue with a long-term test of the Nokia 808 PureView, a device that has many connected camera fans excited.

I took in the Nokia N8 for testing nearly two years ago and before that I was a Nokia N82 owner for two years. I’ve had a short term ownership of the Omnia Pro and Experia X10 during the last two years too. All excellent cameraphones. I’m excited to be testing the PureView.

Read the full story

“What?” “Why?” These are the two words I heard the most in conversations about the Nokia 808 Pure View at MWC last week.  The same words could be muttered by millions of potential customers too. Here’s why the Nokia 808 Pure View deserves serious attention from everyone in the mobile phone and mobile camera space and why the 41MP number really means more than just marketing.

You might know me as the guy that still carries a Nokia phone. I’ve used the Nokia N82 and now the N8 for thousands of images of my family and friends and for thousands of images from events around the world over the last 4 years. I bought the N82 but Nokia gave the N8 to me as a test device in 2010. I’m still reporting on it, and locked into it, today. There’s nothing in the smartphone arena that beats it for stunning daylight photography and clear flash photography and nothing that beats it for camera connectivity. HSPA, Wi-Fi and 3G with connectivity to my favourite sharing sites. What more could you want from a camera?

More pixels?  How about 41 million? Welcome to the Nokia 808 Pure View

“What?” “Why?”

Read the full story

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.