It’s with a Nokia 808 in-hand that I decided to kill an hour at the port of Dunkirk in France recently. It’s a grim place. The petro and chemical industry, the lorry parks, old rail infrastructure and the grime caused by the transport of 29 million tonnes of freight per year and 13 million tonnes of roll-on-roll-off vehicles. 2.5 million passengers pass through that part of the port every year and most of those go via the DFDS (was Norfolk Lines) ferry that runs every 2 hours to Dover. Nearly 750 thousand vehicles per year pass through a parking bay with one set of toilets located in a reception building that is, like a disused prison, depressing and interesting at the same time.

Image via the Port of Dunkirk. Reception building and waiting area at middle bottom of image.

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It’s just become available on my Nokia 808 (A generic UK version) and despite a few download restarts due to the damn WiFi dropping out (one of the known issues I’ll be checking for) it’s installed and updated without issue.

Go check your 808 for updates now (settings –> phone –> phone management –> device manager –> (menu) check for updates.

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The iPhone is the biggest selling connected camera in the world. It’s pretty smart too and with iPhone 5, Apple were really pushing the quality, speed and features at the launch event.

Image via Tech2

Images are starting to appear online now and so it’s time to start the analysis. I’m taking a look at low-light performance here because I think it’s an area where only the best smartphones can compete.

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I’ve read the white paper multiple times, spoken to most of the people in this video and thought long and hard about the technology. I’m a fan and a believer that the pixel wars have just started. I just hope this method hasn’t been completely locked up in patents. Watch the video below to get a good feel for what the 808 can do.

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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.