Nokia PureView 808 preview - How good is Nokia's 41MP phone?

Publish date: 2023-02-01

If there’s ever been a nit to pick with most smartphones, it was usually related with the phone’s camera.

In this area, Nokia (regardless of its dwindling market share) has been far ahead of the competition, with the 12MP Carl Zeiss-lensed camera on the Nokia N8 blowing the competition out of the water. Now, the Finnish company managed to raise the bar even higher with the introduction of the Nokia PureView 808 phone, that features an unheard-of 41MP camera!

About the Nokia Pureview 808

The Nokia PureView 808 was introduced at the recently concluded Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona. Before moving on to the device’s most distinctive feature – the camera – let’s take a few minutes to talk about the phone itself.

The PureView 808 is primarily aimed at camera enthusiasts, so, as with any niche phone, Nokia had to do a few compromises in other departments. First and foremost, considering Nokia’s intense promotional campaign for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.5, it’s a little surprising to find that the PureView 808 runs Symbian Belle OS. This is even more confusing when you consider that Nokia announced that Symbian will be “sunset” in the US market in 2012. (Even though there’s been no official announcement, is this a sign that the PureView 808 will not reach US shores?) Secondly, the phone is of a decidedly chunky design, which is further emphasized by the large camera pod on the back. The phone looks and feels more like a regular digital camera than most of the smartphones found on the market today.

Nokia PureView 808 specs include:

Performance

The 1400 mAh battery provides 11 hours of talk time over 2G, 6.5 hour over 3G, and an impressive 465 hours of standby time. We don’t have yet information on how will the powerful camera of the PureView 808 affect battery life, especially when doing HD video recording. Answering this question will require us to put the device through a hands-on session, which will be able to do once the Nokia PureView 808 is released, in May 2012.

The Future

With the announcement of the PureView 808, a popular phrase comes to mind, adapted to say “one small step for Nokia, one giant leap for mobile camera technology.” Nokia was already leading the pack with the 12MP camera on the N8 (where most high-end Android devices feature 8MP), and has now upped the ante to new limits. It’s difficult to say whether Android device manufacturers will adopt similar technologies in the near future. But in a highly competitive market, with manufacturers striving to one-up each other with every new device, it’s not inconceivable to imagine a future where your next Android device will feature the brilliant camera technology we see in the PureView 808.

Here is a video to help you further understand the technological marvel that is the Nokia PureView 808.

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