Nokia stoked that camera speculation itself with its TV commercial yesterday; since then, the first shot of the Lumia 925 has leaked. You could be forgiven for seeing Nokia almost as a mobile photography company first these days, given imaging tends to be its top-line features for every new smartphone.

Nokia has been pushing camera tech for years now, but arguably made its name as an innovator with the 808 PureView of 2012. It may have been chunky, and used Symbian – which Nokia had already confirmed was in its death-throes – but it also tore up the playbook for mobile photography, approaching elements like lossless zooming and balancing picture size with levels of noise in previously-unseen ways.

The 808 is best remembered for its 41-megapixel sensor, a huge CMOS positively overspilling with pixels. At the time, Nokia likened it to putting out more buckets to catch more rainfall: the 808 was designed not to produce ridiculously high resolution stills, but more average shots (the default was 5-megapixels) that combined data from clusters of pixels to smooth out glitches and aberrations, and make for more accurate colors and brightness.

“The new Nokia Lumia is coming…” teaser video:

In the process, it also enabled lossless digital zooming: zoom without the moving lenses of an optical system. By cropping sections of the image – still at the 5-megapixel resolution – the 808 could effectively zoom into the frame but without the quality loss associated with every other digital zoom.

So far, though, we’re yet to see that original PureView approach replicated on a Windows Phone. The Lumia 920 and 928 both bear PureView branding, for instance, but their emphasis has been on the way more typical megapixel sensors can be supported with optical image stabilization to boost picture quality. Instead of the pixel-clusters of the 808, both of the high-end Windows Phones try to craft better images by holding their sensors steady.

That’s not to say they can’t be “true” PureView just because they lack a few dozen megapixels, however. The massive sensor was only half of the 808 story: equally important was Nokia’s custom Carl Zeiss optics, which were essential for piping the right light in the right way to the oversized CMOS. Nokia even took us to meet with the Zeiss team for a behind-the-scenes look at what optical magic was used, a complex, five-lens assembly with a range of aspheric surfaces that explained some of the 808′s thickness, just as the broad sensor explained its width.

Lenses may not be as immediately headline-grabbing as great lashings of megapixels, but they’re the unsung heroes that Nokia has been busily working away on. Zeiss and Nokia renewed their partnership back in early 2012, and came up with what’s described as “PureView Phase 2″: a groundbreaking optical image stabilization lens which can be paired with a more traditional-resolution sensor.

Discussed in this white paper [pdf link] around the time of the Lumia 920, the second-gen system actually has a more light-friendly lens than the 808 manages: f/2.0 versus the original PureView’s f/2.4, with the same 26mm wide optics. That works with an image stabilization system that rather than move just a single lens element, actually shifts the whole optical assembly up to 500 times per second.

Hardware is only half of any story, of course, and Nokia will undoubtedly have software news to share about the Lumia 925 as well. As we’ve seen from the company’s own work to-date on Camera Lenses, and on rivals’ photography systems like Zoe on the HTC One and the native GIF-maker on the Galaxy S 4, ways of not only shooting but of manipulating stills are big business in today’s handsets.

They all demand good quality to begin with, though, and interestingly all approach that in different ways: a small number of gigantic UltraPixels from HTC, 13-megapixels-worth of smaller pixels from Samsung, and whatever PureView combination Nokia decides to bless the Lumia 925 with.

Nokia isn’t a camera company, but it’s camera technology that it’s counting on to set it apart in the market. We’ll find out how the Lumia 925 fits into that strategy tomorrow, when Nokia unveils the phone officially at its London, UK event on May 14th.

The obvious interpretation of the tagline is a super-high-resolution sensor, something previously rumored for the EOS and to which Nokia itself is no stranger. Chatter of the EOS picked up at the top end of the year, described as offering “proper PureView” in a similar manner to the well-esteemed but niche 808 PureView. However, there’s also talk of a separate device, the Nokia Catwalk, which is also believed to have a large-megapixel-count sensor (though smaller than EOS) and a metal body.

Although recent Lumia handsets, such as the 920, have borne the PureView brand, Nokia has yet to repeat its complex pixel-clustering approach to high-resolution photography on the 808. That phone used a whopping 41-megapixel sensor, though defaulted to roughly 5-megapixel stills: the camera combined data from multiple adjacent pixels to iron out any glitches or mistakes, or alternatively could provide lossless-quality digital zooming.

As a system, the original PureView technology worked – you can see quite how well in our review of the Nokia 808 PureView – but the oversized sensor had unavoidable consequences on the heft of the handset. The larger-than-normal build, along with the fact that the roughly five year development time meant it was still running Symbian, rather than Windows Phone, meant it never amounted to much more than a curio in Nokia’s line-up.

Assuming the EOS – or whatever Lumia name the phone is officially dubbed – can avoid that bulk issue, it could well succeed where the 808 struggled, however. According to the rumor-mill, it will use a specially-waterproofed, aluminum casing courtesy of nano-coating experts P2i, though it’s impossible to tell from the commercial whether the handset is metal or metal-effect plastic.

Nokia is no stranger to teaser-campaigns, with the company having spent much of the last seven days flirting around the new Lumia 928. That handset, headed to Verizon in a few days time, was originally expected to make its official debut alongside the “EOS” on Tuesday, but Nokia pulled the trigger on the announcement on Friday last week.

SlashGear will be with Nokia this coming Tuesday to bring back all the details of the new Lumia.

SOURCE: TechCrunch; Pocket-lint

The Nokia 808 PureView is a smartphone that’s meant to be used primarily as a camera. It’s got a massive lens configuration on its back that Nokia never intended to compete with the thin and light frames of the high-end smartphones we’re seeing throughout the industry today. Instead it was (and is) meant to show the world that Nokia can, indeed, deliver this camera power in a real market-ready handset.

What we’ve got with the Nokia Lumia 920 is a device that takes on the same “feel” for the brand that Nokia is pushing with “PureView”, this time in a more realistic package for the mass market. This device is not the thinnest smartphone in the world – not by a long shot – but it’s certainly ready to compete against the average top-tier smartphone in its overall package delivery. Nokia is banking on the idea that the camera brand PureView technology will push the rest of their handsets into the limelight.

SIDE NOTE: There’s also the possibility here that the Nokia EOS Windows Phone spoken about recently could be connected to a real-deal high-powered PureView sensor. Think about it!

With the tip you’re seeing here about the 41-megapixel sensor coming to the standard handset, it’s much more likely that a game of “telephone” is going on. That means that the original message was likely something more like “Nokia will bring on more high-powered PureView smartphones in 2013″, translated several times to come out to “Nokia PureView smartphones (started with the 808) will come to market in 2013.” The realistic way of looking at this situation is as follows:

Nokia will continue to push forth with PureView brand camera technology in the handsets they deliver that, first and foremost, deliver an overall solid experience in and of themselves. Another possibility is that Nokia is evolving as quickly as HTC and will deliver something wild like multiple layers of lenses sandwiched together to create a camera that, in the end, works with enough sensors that they’d have otherwise created a 41-megapixel photo.

Perhaps four layers of 10 megapixel sensors to create one beast of a photo? We shall see!

“During our transition to Windows Phone through 2012, we continued to ship devices based on Symbian” Nokia wrote in its financial results. “The Nokia 808 PureView, a device which showcases our imaging capabilities and which came to market in mid-2012, was the last Symbian device from Nokia.”

Symbian had, in various iterations, lingered around since the late 1990s, though became near-synonymous with Nokia  after the company acquired it in 2008. However, despite attempts to make it finger-friendly for the growing breed of touchscreen devices, Symbian never quite caught up with its smartphone rivals; while fans highlighted its flexibility, iOS and Android were easier to use and more immediately user-friendly.

Ironically, as it faced its final few devices, Symbian had been refined into a reasonable mid-range platform. With the Belle upgrade, progressively rolled out to older devices such as the N8, it borrowed elements from Android and other OSes, polishing away some of the initial confusion-factor.

That redemption was short-lived, however, and Nokia’s wholesale adoption of Windows Phone meant Symbian had to go. The 808 PureView, Nokia’s 41-megapixel photography experiment, was stuck with Symbian since it would have taken the company too long to rework the five-year project to use Windows Phone instead, though recent rumors indicate a true PureView Windows Phone device, codenamed Nokia EOS, is in the pipeline for this year.

[via TechCrunch]

While Nokia has so-far used polycarbonate plastic in a variety of bright hues for its Windows Phones, the EOS will supposedly have an aluminum chassis. That won’t be the only aesthetic tweak; rather than the curved edges of the current Lumia line-up, the EOS will supposedly have “squared edges” as Nokia refreshes its design language.

Exactly what’s meant by a “similar sensor” to that of the 808 PureView is unclear at this stage. Nokia’s first PureView handset introduced an incredibly pixel-dense CMOS, though the chip was still oversized in comparison to the usual smartphone camera fare. That made the 808 a hefty handset, though allowed Nokia to do clever software tricks combining data from clusters of nearby pixels to create 5-megapixel-equivalent shots with considerably more detail than what might normally be produced from a phone.

One possibility is that Nokia could be more conservative in its oversampling, combining data from fewer clustered pixels and thus allowing for a smaller sensor overall. That would maintain the ethos of PureView technology, without contributing too heavily to bulk. Alternatively, Nokia could have developed a smaller version of its 41-megapixel sensor, which would help reduce the bulk of the EOS.

The Nokia EOS won’t be the first Windows Phone to bear the PureView branding – that would be the Lumia 920, which we reviewed last year – but it would arguably be the first to properly stick to how PureView was originally billed. The Lumia 920 used a relatively standard camera sensor, but mounted it in a special “elastic” framework which helped reduce camera-shake and allowed for longer exposures without blur.

Also rumored to be in Nokia’s pipeline for 2013 is the “Catwalk,” a Lumia 920 replacement that would also have an aluminum chassis. That new material will supposedly allow for a smaller, lighter device, addressing criticisms that the 920 was too heavy in comparison to rival devices.

Finally, there’s also believed to be a Windows RT tablet in Nokia’s future, with the speculated slate supposedly coming with a Surface-style keyboard cover. The 10-inch tablet could be revealed as soon as February, insiders claim, potentially at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The first and probably most obvious place your mind should be wandering to is the iPhone. With this Apple hero device landing on three major carriers with the launch of the iPhone 5, it’s almost a given at this point in our western society that a person wouldn’t mind receiving an iPhone as a gift. If your special someone is out of the iPhone universe specifically for one reason or another, you’ll want to head down one of two paths: Android or Windows Phone.

With Windows Phone 8 came the launch and relative re-birth of Nokia in an extremely vibrant and fun-loving wave of devices that hit most major carriers in the USA. The biggest and the best of these devices is the Nokia Lumia 920 which is exclusive to AT&T at the moment. After that you’ve got the Nokia Lumia 822 from Verizon, the Nokia Lumia 820 from T-Mobile, and more than likely one or two more additions to the Lumia line before the end of the year. Another heavy contender in this space is the HTC Windows Phone 8X carried by AT&T as well as Verizon and T-Mobile.

As for Android, you’ve got a fierce battle going on between lines and heroes, with four titans making up the entirety of our selections for best-of-the-moment. The most recent big-name drop has been the Google Nexus 4, one of two of LG’s recent beast releases. LG also brings on the Optimus G with AT&T 4G LTE, a slightly more high-powered version of the hardware brought on in the Nexus 4, both of them working with one of the most powerful processors on the market, the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro. This Google hero phone is sold as a 2-year-contract-holding T-Mobile Nexus 4 and as a no-contract Nexus 4 sold online via the Google Play store – they’re both exactly the same device, just different prices based on data plan acceptance.

HTC came out swinging this year and didn’t let up all the way through to Fall with the HTC DROID DNA with Verizon 4G LTE, the current record holder for highest-definition-display on a smartphone. It’s backed up by the whole HTC One crew, leading off with the brand new HTC One X+ for AT&T, a much more high-powered version of the original with a fantastic NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor in it – hot stuff! The original version is still out there as the HTC One X (without the +), exclusive to AT&T here in the USA. Next in line is the slightly smaller HTC One S carried by T-Mobile in the USA – this device has been upgraded to a much more awesome casing quite recently – a hot pick! The HTC One V is also floating around out there for those of you looking specifically for the HTC branding but not wanting to drop a ton of bills – though the One S is free at times, depending on when you’re shopping – good luck!

Motorola was purchased by Google earlier this year and since they’ve had that extra bump of influence, they’ve made some fantastic handsets that retain their hardcore hardware build and bust out with a newly refined user interface on the inside. The Motorola DROID RAZR M has one of the smallest bezels on the market, making it appear to be just a wickedly bright display sitting in the palm of your hand. The M’s bigger brother DROID RAZR HD sticks with the greatness that was the original DROID RAZR and boosts the processing power as well as the density of the display. The DROID RAZR MAXX HD crowns the collection with all that good stuff plus a massive, gigantic, beastly battery (and it’s still rather thin!)

Then there’s Samsung. If the person you’re buying a gift for doesn’t want an iPhone, chances are they’ll be entirely stoked to get either a Samsung Galaxy S III or a Samsung Galaxy Note II. The big difference is in the ultra massiveness of the Galaxy Note II, that and it’s build-in S-Pen for writing on the screen. The Samsung family of devices creates a friendly software and hardware compatibility ecosystem the lines of which you’ll only otherwise find at Apple – and that’s saying a lot. The Samsung Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II are available on most if not all of the major carriers in the USA and abroad – have a peek at the Galaxy S III here on Verizon as well as AT&T and T-Mobile. The Galaxy Note II we’ve also got several reviews of, hitting on the T-Mobile version and the Verizon version – and keep note that we’ll be taking another look at the Verizon version likely by the time this post is published to see how lovely its data speeds are – otherwise the differences between each of these devices on each carrier is relegated to the carrier-pushed apps and the costs inflicted upon your person. Also the Verizon version of the Note II has a massive beast of a Verizon logo on the front button – it’s fierce!

Another rather odd contender that will certainly surprise your gift-getter is the Nokia 808 PureView running Symbian – that’s not Android, it’s not iOS, and it’s not Windows Phone. This device also has a 41-megapixel camera – truly the most intense camera phone in the history of the world.

The 808 PureView uses oversampling to construct incredibly detailed, accurate pictures. Each pixel of its roughly 5-megapixel final stills is made up of the combined data from seven pixels on the sensor itself: by averaging out the results, and discounting anything which is obviously an outlier, Nokia can create a more impressive image than you’d get from, say, a regular 5-megapixel (or even 8-megapixel) traditional camera-phone.

In contrast, the Lumia 920 has just that: a regular 8-megapixel sensor. What’s special is how it’s mounted, with what Nokia calls “floating lens” technology, putting it on a set of actual, physical springs inside the 10.7mm thick chassis. As you can see in the video below, the difference is marked: video is smoother, as if your Lumia 920 is mounted on a tiny Steadycam, while stills should show an improvement in low-light performance, as exposures can be longer without introducing blur from shaky hands.

Update: Nokia has admitted that the video demo it put together was not filmed with the Lumia 920, and that it was only intended to simulate what the OIS system could do. The second video, however, shows an actual side-by-side comparison filmed on the new smartphone.

Unfortunately, what it also means is that none of the 808 PureView’s other ambitious enhancements are present: you don’t get lossless zooming on the Lumia 920, and there’s no sign of Rich Recording for higher quality audio in video clips. Whether the market has heard enough about the 808 to know what they’re missing on the Lumia 920 is questionable, though.

Still, as Nokia’s imaging chief Damien Dinning said earlier in the week, there’s more to PureView than just big sensors. We’ve been waiting for Nokia to show us how it will differentiate its Windows Phones from those of other OEMs – in more ways than just software – for some time, and it’s good to see the Lumia 920 finally deliver on that promise.

Using three color filters – for red, green, and blue wavelengths – would allow the graphene sensor to build up a normal full-color pixel. It could also be more efficient in low-light than a CMOS approach, as used in current Nokia phones, as a single layer of graphene absorbs just 2.3-percent of passing light.

Meanwhile, the graphene-based system could be more sensitive to light than traditional camera sensors, reflecting light back out through the layers and so getting a second opportunity to register it. That could mean roughly twice the light detection efficiency, Nokia suggests.

The upshot, so the patent application insists, is a camera sensor that’s potentially easier and cheaper to manufacture, smaller and thinner than existing versions, and that also works well as a pre-amplifier for more traditional photocells. Stack the graphene sensor on top of one of those, it’s pointed out, and it will grab extra light/color data without blocking the majority of the light passing through.

Nokia’s PureView technology, as in the 808 PureView, has so far relied on an oversized sensor paired with high-quality optics and software trickery – most notably oversampling, where data from multiple adjacent pixels is combined to make for a more detailed and accurate end image – to work its magic. However, such oversized sensors aren’t particularly compatible with the compact smartphones in demand today; the new flagship Lumia 920 PureView expected to be announced this week is tipped to have a “mere” 8-megapixel sensor, though Nokia’s photography expert insists that doesn’t preclude it from delivering PureView-style magic.

If Nokia can refine and commercialize graphene sensors, however, that could mean big megapixel counts without big devices. Unfortunately there’s no indication of quite how far down the development process Nokia might be, so we’ll probably have to wait a while to see such devices reach the market.

[via WPCentral]

“As said many times before it’s NOT about the number of pixels but what you do with them” Dinning pointed out, going on to argue that “the future of photography will be about how you use pixels, optics and image processing together.”

Contrary to those suggesting that a PureView Lumia would need considerably more than 8-megapixels in order to qualify, Dinning described the tech as more of a hybridization of multiple factors. “PureView is about blending optics, pixels and image processing in new and different ways to allow you to do things you otherwise cannot” he explained, “NOT a single specific feature or specification.”

The uncertainty around branding is fueled in part because Nokia so far has released only one PureView device, the 41-megapixel 808. That uses its excess of pixels for oversampling – combining data from seven individual dots for each final pixel in a roughly 5-megapixel still – as well as to deliver lossless zooming. The end results are astonishingly good, though the lenses and CMOS sensor required are bulky.

That might be acceptable for a niche photography camera running Symbian, but Nokia needs to keep the Windows Phone 8 Lumia line-up slinky and pocketable. It’s unclear what software magic the company will combine with its supposed 8-megapixel Lumia 920 camera, though the expectation is that it will indeed be more a matter of processing than of the sort of raw oversampling seen on the 808 PureView.

SlashGear is headed off to NYC for Nokia and Microsoft’s Wednesday event, when we’ll see just what the two companies have been working on to launch Windows Phone 8. Catch up with all the rumors and leaks around the event in our wrap-up.

Hardware

Miniaturization can only get you so far: if you want 41-megapixels – and Nokia really does – then you have to accept some heft with it. As a result the 808 PureView is a chunky phone, measuring in at 123.9 x 60.2 x 13.9 mm and 169 grams, though it’s biased toward the lens section with its oversized sensor. In the hand, though, it’s actually quite a pleasant thing to hold: the textured plastic back cover feels high-quality and sturdy, and your forefinger butts naturally against the curve of the camera hump.

That’s not to say you don’t notice it when it’s in your pocket. In contrast to the slimline devices we’ve grown used to, the 808 PureView makes for a considerable bulge; we could fit it into a jeans pocket, front or back, but it wasn’t the most comfortable we’ve ever been.

Controls include a three-button strip along the front, for call, menu and end/power, along with a volume rocker, lock switch and dedicated two-stage camera key on the right edge. Along the top there’s a micro HDMI port (for use with Nokia’s CA0198 HDMI kit) under a flap, a microUSB port for charging, and a 3.5mm headphone socket. Nokia includes a wired hands-free kit of decent audio quality, though we had no issues using third-party headsets with the phone.

Up front there’s a 4-inch AMOLED ClearBlack display clad in a sheet of Corning Gorilla Glass. As with all OLED-based phones it has great viewing angles, contrast and color saturation; however, it’s also running at a mere 360 x 640 resolution, and that means individual pixels are inescapable. The grittiness is visible from the outset, as soon as the start-up Nokia logo appears, and permeates throughout the phone experience. Considering the imaging focus of this phone, it’s a disappointment.

Inside, the 808 PureView packs one of the fastest processors to grace a Symbian device, a single-core ARM 11 running at 1.3GHz. It’s paired with 512MB of RAM and 16GB of storage, expandable with up to 32GB microSD cards. Connectivity includes pentaband HSPA (up to 14.4Mbps down/5.76Mbps up, networking depending) which means support for both AT&T and T-Mobile 3G in the USA, along with Bluetooth 3.0, WiFi b/g/n, NFC and quadband GSM/EDGE. Slot in the optional microUSB to USB Host adapter and you can attach peripherals like USB drives, and there’s A-GPS/GPS for navigation and photo geotagging.

Software and Performance

Software is the 808 PureView’s Achilles’ heel. Symbian, rebranded Nokia Belle in this latest iteration, is old in the tooth and considered outclassed by all but the staunchest of fans. With its UI borrowing some elements of Android – such as the drop-down notifications bar and the differently sized homescreen widgets – and sharing the squircle iconography of MeeGo on the N9 it’s certainly the best looking iteration of Symbian to-date, but day-to-day usability is still a pain.

What’s arguably the deal-breaker for Nokia Belle here is the performance. On the Nokia 700, which also runs Belle on a 1.3GHz single-core, we found ourselves conceding that it could make a reasonable entry-level device for the fledgling smartphone audience. Somewhere along the line, however, the 808 lost whatever turn of speed the 700 managed to squeeze from the processor.

The homescreen is fairly swift, but the 808 soon runs out of steam once you get into the apps. In the messaging app we’d sometimes have hammered out a half-word or so before the on-screen keyboard caught up; scroll fast through a full gallery and you’ll see nothing but placeholder thumbnails, turning navigating images into guesswork.

It’s the browser that’s the big nightmare, however, capable of paper of handling full sites but struggling with anything more complex than their mobile versions. Pinch zooming becomes trial and error, tedious since given the low resolution you’ll probably be doing plenty of it. Swipe around the page and you have to wait a second or two for the screen to catch up with you. Flip from portrait to landscape orientation, or back again, and the lag shows itself once more. Most annoying though is how prone to crashing it is, the app periodically shutting down altogether. We didn’t experience a full phone lock-up, but altogether it was enough to make us save our web browsing until we were home.

Oddly, we didn’t experience the same sluggishness on the 808 PureView units running non-final software on our trip to Carl Zeiss several weeks ago. Then, the Nokia seemed as responsive as the 700 had been. It’s possible that the final software tweaks have erred toward scaling back performance in favor of battery life, and if so we’re hoping Nokia sees sense and tips the balance back a little toward usability with a firmware update.

Camera

Make no mistake, the Nokia 808 PureView is all about photography. Nokia’s imaging team spent five years developing PureView – hence it being stuck with Symbian rather than getting Windows Phone like the Lumia series – and took the principles of mobile cameras back to basics in order to improve on quality.

We’ve covered the technology behind PureView on the 808 comprehensively here, but the brief version is that it’s a rethink of how lossless zooming can be supported on a phone. Traditionally that would demand an optical zoom lens, involving bulky moving parts; PureView does it instead with a surfeit of pixels. In PureView mode, the 808 uses its 41-megapixel sensor to capture more typical 2-, 5- or 8-megapixel shots, and in fact Nokia expects most owners to stick at 5-megapixel quality.

Nokia 808 PureView technology:

At 1x zoom, each pixel making up the final frame has around seven pixels on the sensor to feed into it, reducing the likelihood of a glitch or noise making it into the image. PureView can simply ignore any obvious outliers, making for more accurate shots. However, if you want to zoom in, the 808 can take a full-resolution (i.e. 2-, 5- or 8-megapixel) subset of the whole frame, similar to how a digital zoom magnifies a portion but with no loss in detail.

Exactly how much you can zoom depends on what PureView resolution you’re using – the 808 won’t allow you to get past the point where it can save a full-resolution image – so you get more range in 2-megapixel mode than you do at 8-megapixels. It averages at roughly 3x at 5-megapixels. The phone will also allow you to shoot at “full” resolution, either 34-megapixel 16:9 aspect images taken across the full width of the sensor, or 38-megapixel 4:3 aspect images taken across the full height of the sensor, though in that case you don’t get any zoom option.

The 808′s camera app has obviously changed from the Nokia Belle norm to accommodate PureView, and there are three key modes to choose between. Automatic strips you of all manual control bar toggling the Xenon flash between on/off/auto/red-eye modes, defaulting to roughly 5-megapixel frames, though you still get touch-focus. Scenes mode offers a choice of auto, landscape, portrait, sports, night, night portrait, spotlight and snow configurations, again with flash options and touch-focus.

Finally, there’s Creative mode, where the guts of PureView are opened up to more avid tinkerers. The 808 can be toggled between PureView mode – with the choice of three resolutions and both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios – and Full Resolution mode – with either 16:9 or 4:3 settings – and save in either Normal or Superfine JPEG quality modes. Color tones can be switched between normal, vivid, sepia or black & white, and there’s optional bracketing, interval or self-timer modes. With interval, the 808 becomes a time-lapse camera, capable of shooting up to 1,500 images every 30 minutes (or as low as every 5 seconds).

Then there are sliders for saturation, contrast and sharpness, while icons on the preview screen control flash, exposure, lighting type, ISO (from 50 – 1600, with an Auto mode) and the ability to turn off the neutral density filter. Once you have a clutch of settings you prefer, you can save them to one of the three custom shortcuts for easier retrieval.

Is it worth taking the time to play? Oh yes, yes it really is. We reluctantly left Carl Zeiss and our last experience with the 808 PureView wowed by quite how capable the new Nokia is, and nothing from our review unit has convinced us to think otherwise. This isn’t just “good for a phone-camera” either; the 808 is easily able to produce shots that put dedicated point-and-shoots to shame.

Noise is almost non-existent, colors are as accurate as we’ve ever seen from a phone, and – as long as you take the time to tap the screen to set focus – crisp detail. Low light performance is hugely impressive, even before you bother turning on the (excellent) Xenon flash, as PureView squeezes all the extra pixel data into the final image.

In full resolution mode, meanwhile, you lack zooming ability but you get images of a scale that would traditionally demand a dedicated camera. There’s something near-magical about being able to glance across an image, think “what’s going on there?” and zoom in without facing a screenful of pixelated mush. At 34/38-megapixel resolution there’s no PureView finessing going on – there aren’t the extra pixels to enable it – but it does demonstrate just how capable the sensor and companion Zeiss optics are.

As for video, the 808 PureView will record in Automatic, Scenes (auto, low light, sports, spotlight and snow) or Creative modes, at 360p, 720p or 1080p resolution. A choice of 15, 24, 25 and 30fps frame rates are supported, plus the same color tone options as in stills mode, together with exposure and contrast. Since even 1920 x 1080 Full HD resolution doesn’t come close to what the 808′s sensor is capable of capturing, the same PureView oversampling is used to improve video quality, and just as with stills the evidence of that comes through in the final frame.

Nokia 808 PureView 1080p HD video sample:

Our only complaint is the somewhat sluggish continuous autofocus, which has a tendency to wander and is occasionally slow to refix. You can, however, tap to manually set a focus point. While your fingers are near the screen, it’s worth playing with Nokia’s clever zoom control: you can pinch-zoom, of course, but we found it easier to use the single-finger zooming where sliding your thumb up and down adjusts the degree of magnification. It’s easy to keep both hands steadying the 808 and still zoom in, and when you’re zooming during video capture the actual magnification doesn’t happen until you lift your finger, allowing you to precisely frame without the hunting of regular systems. Alternatively you can use the zoom rocker, and unlike the stepped zoom levels of some devices, it’s a silky-smooth transition.

Nokia 808 PureView 1080p HD video sample:

Audio during video recording is often overlooked, but Nokia has saved a little magic for that, too. The PureView has twin microphones for capturing stereo sound, but it also includes Rich Recording, a way to capture high-volume audio without suffering from distortion or clipping. In fact, Nokia claims the 808 is capable of handling four-times louder sound than regular phone microphones, without having to introduce the sort of filters that can leave the audio track weedy.

Going by Nokia’s spec sheet, the 808 PureView should be able to capture the sound of a jet engine from 100-feet away without any stereo distortion. Topping out at 145dB, in fact, it’s beyond the point where human ears would likely suffer permanent damage even if they’re equipped with hearing protection. An average rock concert, meanwhile, at a more humble 115dB should be no problem at all for the 808 PureView, though we’ll need to schedule one on our jam-packed social calendar to actually test that out.

Getting photos and video off the 808 is reasonably straightforward. The phone can be set to show up as a Mass Storage device when plugged in via USB, appearing on your PC or Mac as an external drive (rather than demanding a management app as per Windows Phone). However we were surprised to find transfers very sluggish to our test Mac: shuttling just over 440MB of photos and video took around five minutes, in fact. There’s no native option to automatically upload images to an online gallery.

There are more 808 PureView camera samples here

The Future of PureView

Nokia has already confirmed that PureView technology won’t be limited to just the 808. However, that’s already prompted confusion around just what sort of resolution sensors we can expect in future Lumia Windows Phones. PureView does not necessarily mean 41-megapixels – Nokia picked that number to satisfy headlines and deliver a 3x optical zoom equivalent for 5-megapixel frames – but instead refers to the oversampling technology; a lower-resolution sensor would still deliver a lossless zoom, albeit with a smaller range, while allowing for a thinner device.

Phone and Battery

Nokia has a strong track record with phone radios, and the 808 PureView is no exception. We had no issues with keeping a signal, and the dual-microphones meant in-call audio was clear. The 808′s 1,400 mAh battery is rated for up to 6.5hrs of 3G talk time or 540hrs of 3G standby, though the actual sort of longevity you’ll see from it is very much dependent on how much you play with the camera. The Xenon flash in particular will chug through battery in short order. In practice, we managed a day of relatively eager use before we had to reach for the mains adapter.

Wrap-Up

Viewed as a modern phone, the 808 PureView is a recipe for frustration. It’s heavy and chunky, the screen lacks pixels, Nokia Belle is short on apps and long on aggravation, and even those apps that are onboard run with varying degrees of wretchedness on the wheezing processor. When the 808 starts to make more sense is when you flip it around, and consider it not so much a phone with an amazing camera, but an amazing camera with a 3G internet connection.

With such mundane matters as messaging, internet browsing, multimedia and apps left to a more flexible (but less photographically-capable) platform like iOS or Android, that frees up the 808 PureView to do what it undoubtedly does best: take awesome photos and video. If you can find space in your pocket or bag for two phones, and you’re a keen shutterbug, then there are huge advantages to using the 808 rather than your regular phone camera.

Therein lies the rub: at $699 unlocked and SIM-free in the US, it’s an expensive second device. That would get you a good Micro Four Thirds camera, though blind testing suggests the 808 can produce photos as good as, or better than, such compacts. It would also be enough for an entry-level DSLR, though you’d lose any semblance of pocket-friendliness in that case.

In the end, though, even the fact that we’re comparing the 808 PureView to DSLRs is testament to Nokia’s achievement. Few people will actually go out and buy it themselves, but then the 808 is really a test bench for PureView technology, a proof-of-concept. Now that it has convinced us of its merits, Nokia can leverage the branding to differentiate its Windows Phone range. Frankly, the sooner it can do that, the better.

We’ve received our 808 PureView here at SlashGear and are currently busy putting it through its paces, but so far we’ve been impressed with the quality of the camera output. Reviews and samples from across the internet also indicate just how good that camera really is, although for the price Nokia is asking we should certainly hope so. Unfortunately, it’s all held back by the inclusion of the Symbian operating system, but hopefully we’ll see the technology make a jump to Windows Phone in the not too distant future.

The phone will be sold unlocked in the United States as well for around $699, with a slightly later release of July 8th. Good news for those on T-Mobile USA though, as the handset will be compatible with the carrier’s 3G bands in addition to AT&T’s. We’ll be bringing you a full review of the phone shortly, so stick around to find out if the PureView is worth the high asking price.

Inside the custom printed Golla bag is the PureView phone itself, accompanied by a flexible-legged GorillaPod style tripod and phone clamp (the 808 lacks a proper tripod screw of its own), and a rubber skin protector. Nokia also threw in an external battery, the slimline DC-16, for topping up charge on the go, and a CA0198 HDMI kit, which hooks up the 808′s microHDMI to a full-sized HDMI connection.

Altogether it’s the ideal setup for a mobile photographer who wants a camera with a built-in 3G connection, though disappointingly there’s no sign that Nokia will actually be offering this as a pre-collected kit. Instead there’ll be various bundles – ranging from the 808 PureView alone, up through packages pieced together according to carrier, retailer and promotion – which is a shame as we can imagine PureView enthusiasts would flock to the branded bag.

Still, part of the joy of PureView, as we’ve already seen on our test mission to Carl Zeiss, is the ability to fit a camera capable of taking outlandishly good photos into the pocket of your jeans (as long as you don’t mind a few “pleased to see me?” jokes through the day). This isn’t a DSLR that demands a bag or neck-strap; it’s a phone that, from what we’ve seen so-far, blows away most camera-phones on the market.

The photography side is one aspect of the new Nokia. It’s what’s happening on the other side that we’ll also be focusing on: how it holds up as a phone. Symbian – in its latest Nokia Belle iteration – has built up something of a reputation for itself, and not a great one, though in recent builds its been approaching Android levels of usability. The big question is whether it’s sufficient to prevent you needing a second smartphone for your other pocket, for those times when you’re not playing shutterbug.

Nokia is keen for us to put the 808 through its paces, and with PureView set to show up – not in 41-megapixel form, but with the core technology in place – in future Lumia Windows Phones there’s a lot riding on it. We’ll have photo and video samples for you soon, along with a full review.

The concept behind PureView is that all of those megapixels are used to produce super-detailed, accurate images of roughly 5- or 8-megapixels. By clustering data from up to seven pixels into a single pixel in the final frame, the 808 PureView can ditch any extraneous or incorrect data and serve up a more accurate shot. There’s more on the technology here.

As we discovered ourselves, Nokia’s camera concept lives up to the game-changer billing. Images are surprisingly smaller in file size than those from rival 5- and 8-megapixel cameras, but still look significantly better: colors are more accurate and there’s more detail to be seen. Nokia has already said that it plans to bring PureView technology – though not necessarily the 41-megapixel sensor – to future Lumia Windows Phones.

For now, however, there’s only one PureView device around, and that’s the 808. It’s available to preorder today, with more details here.

That limitation on connectivity is down to the 3G radio bands the 808 PureView supports; unsurprisingly, there’s no way of using the Nokia on Verizon or other CDMA carriers. Otherwise you get the usual WiFi and Bluetooth, NFC and HDMI, a 4-inch capacitive touchscreen and 16GB of onboard storage along with a microSD card slot.

If you’re not willing to cough up that sort of cash – or if Symbian is the key turn-off – then Nokia has again reconfirmed its intentions of bringing PureView technology (though not necessarily the 41-megapixel sensor) to future Lumia Windows Phones.

One thing we really can’t argue with is the camera quality. SlashGear caught up with Nokia and lens expert Carl Zeiss last month to shoot some hands-on samples with the 808 PureView, and came away wowed by the quality of the images. Pre-sales of the smartphone are expected to begin later this week, and you can sign up for alerts on when that happens here.

Update: Nokia’s official blog says it made a mistake with the original specifications, and that the 808 PureView will support both AT&T and T-Mobile USA 3G with a pentaband radio. Official spec sheets are being updated to reflect the network support. [Thanks Mark!]

Other than that, the press release doesn’t go into too much detail. Nokia notes that the Lund location will become “a key site” for imaging technology in addition to two Finnish locales, Espoo and Tampere. Jo Harlow, executive vice president for Smart Device at Nokia, says: “This transaction would enable us to combine our leadership in camera devices with their expertise in imaging.”

The first thought for the acquisition goes to including PureView technology in future Windows Phones, something that Nokia has alluded to in the past. The company has been on the hunt for digital imaging specialists via job listings, and this move will surely bring on board the type of talent they’re looking for to help advance smartphone cameras. Will that be enough to save the failing company? Only time will tell.

Big sensors in smartphones aren’t new, but neither have we seen a vast improvement in mobile photography. Backside-illuminated sensors, such as are included in the iPhone 4S and HTC One X, have certainly improved low-light photography, but we haven’t seen a ground-shaking difference stepping up from, say, 5- to 8-megapixels. Moreover, even with a good mobile camera like on Apple’s smartphone, it’s all too easy to shoot a bad frame, and that’s before you even get to things like resolution-shedding digital zooms.

Listen to Nokia and Carl Zeiss, however, and you soon start to realize that rival phone manufacturers simply aren’t thinking big enough. “The art and science of making a really good digital camera lies in combining a lens of convincing performance with an adequate imaging sensor and capable imaging algorithms” the two firms said all the way back in 2006, before deciding that “we need to set the standard in imaging in phones” the following year.

Thus was PureView born, not a single camera-phone but an umbrella technology consisting of three strands: a high-performing sensor, complementary lenses and optics, and proprietary Nokia processing. It’s important to remember that PureView doesn’t necessarily mean a 41-megapixel sensor, though that’s the headline-grabbing figure Nokia opted for with the debut model to wear the brand.

It wasn’t a random choice, either. Nokia’s goal was a lossless zoom with the quality benefits of optical but the convenience and reliability of digital, and according to the company’s market research, head of imaging Juha Alakarhu told us, a 3x zoom with a 5-megapixel final image was the sweetspot for consumers.

For that to be possible – taking out a section of an overall frame, equal to a 3x enlargement, and still end up with a 5-megapixel image – Nokia needed a 7728 x 5368 sensor, or 41-megapixels. It also made for a relatively huge chip, at 1/1.2-inches, and allowed for the oversampling we discussed in our previous hands-on report.

Therein lies the cause of the 808 PureView’s bulk, Vesa Jutila, Nokia’s head of product marketing, explained. The sensor itself is, while wider and longer than that of 2010′s N8 for instance, not especially thicker. However, it’s when you take into account the required lenses that the size begins to mount. It all comes down to the laws of physics, Jutila says. “If you want high resolution sensors, you need lenses with sufficient focal length.”

Sat in the camera module is a complex five-lens assembly with a range of aspheric surfaces, capable of playing light out over the full extent of Nokia’s pixel-rich sensor. It’s that lens stack which creates the heft, topped with a Gorilla Glass lens cover to match the similarly-toughened touchscreen. It’s also the lens stack which presents the biggest hurdle for slimming PureView technology down, since it involves more than just trimming a sensor.

Nonetheless, Nokia is definitely looking to slimmer iterations, targeting the sort of buyers that might not be so photo-centric in their obsession, and who want decent images but also a more pocket-friendly handset. Set to likely run both Symbian and Windows Phone, depending on model, these upcoming devices will bear the PureView brand but deliver it in different ways, albeit with Nokia sticking to a few core tenets.

Keeping the oversampling of the PureView algorithm and fighting off any sign of interpolation is arguably the most important, Alakarhu told us. Fitting a tiny sensor and then relying on software guesstimation doesn’t fit with the PureView brand, he says. There’s a reason, after all, that professional cameras haven’t followed their cellular cousins in adopting smaller and smaller CMOS sensors, in the name of shedding bulk. A big sensor means more light hitting it, which adds up to more information to pump into the final frame.

PureView is all about information: the sensor may be 41-megapixels, and the 808 capable of 38- or 34-megapixel stills, but Nokia’s goal is actually a new level of brilliance in 5- and 8-megapixel images. What could be an option, however, is doing away with the lossless zoom requirement, in fact ditching the zoom altogether, and opting for a compromise of sensor bulk and resolution with perhaps 20-megapixels rather than 41. That would allow for a diluted four pixel oversampling, combining four individual pixels for each “superpixel” from which the eventual 5-megapixel image was constructed.

Not every future Nokia device will bear the PureView brand, Jutila said. It will instead be used on a subset of devices for those who demand better quality imaging from their handsets, and who are willing to compromise on some degree of size. “Thinner PureView handsets are coming” Jutila insisted, but there’s a broad scope for just how thick they could still be between the slimline Lumia 800 at 12.1 mm, and the 18.07 mm of the 808 at its thickest point. Perhaps even more exciting, Jutila also said that higher resolution PureView devices are also a possibility, declining to discuss any specific roadmap details, but suggesting that more pixels than even the 808′s forty-one million could be on offer.

Ironically, even the 808 PureView doesn’t feel so large after a while. We had a brief chance to revisit the Nokia today, and what had felt chunky and swollen – albeit also pumped full of promise – when we first saw it earlier this week, had evolved into a more familiar shape. The phone fits neatly into the hands, the curve of the casing and the protruding lens bulge allowing your fingers to wrap around it comfortably, and the side buttons fall under your fingertips. There’s no need to take one hand away to use pinch-zooming, either – there’s a single finger slide-zoom instead – and that helps keep shots steady. Sure, it’ll never be considered a small phone, but whether it’s a side-effect of the growing respect for its imaging capabilities, or simply regular old familiarity, what initially appeared vast somehow becomes less objectionable.

PureView is, for Nokia, a vital point of differentiation. On the one hand, it singles out the company from its smartphone rivals across the board – “It took us five years to do it,” Jutila pointed out, “now we’re happy to say to the others, ‘do the same’ … It’s a huge benchmark for the industry, what imaging performance should be” – while on the other it, like Nokia Drive and Nokia Music, will offer something unique from the rest of the Windows Phone status-quo. In Lumia, Jutila reminded us, photography is one of the three core pillars Nokia is focusing on; the company has no current plans to license PureView technology out to its rivals, and as the five year incubation suggests, it’s not just a case of slapping together a big sensor and a powerful GPU to crunch data from it.

If anything will keep Nokia relevant, it’s this sort of investment. As Huawei, ZTE and numerous others have demonstrated, it’s incredibly straightforward to create a cheap smartphone from off-the-shelf hardware and software. It’s equally simple to customize a generic OS, like Android, until it looks suitably different for your brand. Where key products from companies like Apple, Samsung and others succeed is in the areas of user-experience that aren’t so readily replicated: more complex features, time-consuming in their conception and requiring specialist skills or supplies, which help them stand apart from the crowd.

Apple has its famed holistic ecosystem, making the iPhone predictable enough for first-time smartphone owners, but also flexible enough for hundreds of thousands of developers to push the envelope with apps. Samsung, meanwhile, has its supply chain majesty in its favor: incredible displays, cutting-edge processors and high-speed memory.

PureView sample images:

Nokia’s differentiator used to be Symbian. Over time, though, that proved to be a difference that consumers didn’t actually want; now, with Windows Phone, the company is in what for it is the unusual situation of not having the pool pretty much to itself. Apps like Nokia Drive were the quick-fix to that, cooked up in the few months in-between adopting Microsoft’s OS and launching the Lumia line-up; now, we’re seeing the more long-game strategy appear, with technologies like PureView that throw down the gauntlet to rivals and challenge them to compete on truly innovative, distinctive features.

Five years was a long incubation for PureView, but the 808 isn’t the end product of that development: it’s just the first of many. You can find the fruits of our photo journey with the 808 PureView in our full sample gallery.

 [Hint: check the file names to see the image resolution, flash status and other settings details; only three images have been cropped, the rest are as-is from the 808 itself. Photos from the Lumia 900 are all at 8-megapixel resolution]

In a sense, the 808 PureView is two different camera-phones. On the one hand, there’s the raw resolution of the sensor itself: 41-megapixels on paper, but, because Nokia opted to deliver true 4:3 and 16:9 without cropping the former for the latter, as other cameras usually do, actually delivering 38-megapixel 4:3 shots and 34-megapixel 16:9. There’s no zooming in this mode, the PureView team not allowing any interpolation anywhere near the phone.

Arguably the way Nokia expects the 808 PureView to be used, however, is in the dedicated PureView mode. There’s a full-auto option, which leaves the camera to its own devices and outputs roughly 5-megapixel frames, or the choice of manually setting it to deliver either 2-megapixel, 5-megapixel or 8-megapixel PureView images. At 5-megapixels, there are roughly seven pixels for each final pixel in the frame, meaning Nokia can use the best image data from each, and drop out any unexpected glitches (without a loss in end-picture quality), in a process it refers to as oversampling to create “superpixels.”

Nokia told us that it considered using a huge 5-megapixel sensor that would match the 41-megapixel chip in the 808 PureView for physical size, but it ran into aliasing issues. It would also lack the oversampling support, along with the ability to use those extra pixels for the 808 PureView’s other trick: a lossless digital zoom.

Anyone who knows about digital photography has learned to shy away from digital zooms, normally. They work by in effect cropping out and blowing up a section of the image, with a resulting loss of quality and generally an increase in noise. PureView, however, has pixels to spare in its 2- to 8-megapixel settings, and so it can use those extras to grab a full-resolution subset of the overall frame that’s both lossless and zoomed-in.

Nokia 808 PureView zoom comparison:

Lossless zooming and oversampling is a trade-off: the closer you dive into the image, the fewer spare pixels there are for oversampling. The higher resolution picture you’re trying to take, reduces the amount you can zoom, too: so, you can zoom the furthest into the frame when in 2-megapixel mode, a little less in 5-megapixel mode, and less again at 8-megapixels. As with interpolation being banned, so is any form of lossy-zooming, hence there being no option for it at maximum 38/34-megapixels settings.

Of course, the useful thing about PureView is that the zooming needn’t be when you’re taking the image: you can come back to it later and do some post-zooming instead. Panning through an existing shot and cropping out a section of it into a new frame is straightforward, meaning you could feasibly find several good images out of one original picture.

And you won’t struggle to find good images, either. We’ve been consistently amazed by the output from the 808 PureView today, with the phone being capable of some astonishingly good shots both at maximum resolution and at the lower resolutions too. Colors are rich and accurate; noise is incredibly low.

It’s fast, too: lower-res captures are pretty much instantaneous, and you can keep bashing away at 5-megapixel frames one after the other thanks to the dedicated imaging processor Nokia has used. Even 38-megapixel shots are surprisingly quick; there’s a little lag as the frame is saved, but the image itself is captured as soon as you press the button, so there’s none of the “when can I move the phone” uncertainty we’ve seen from laggy rivals.

Nokia asked us not to share samples of the 808 PureView’s video functionality yet, though it’ll shoot up to 1080p Full HD footage (with 4x lossless zoom), or alternatively 720p (with 6x lossless zoom) or 360p (with 12x lossless zoom). Video also gets a clever slide-zoom control, which means you can trigger a zoom from the touchscreen while filming that’s only actually completed when you take your fingers away: that means no hunting and overshooting as is often the way in cellphone video. Finally, there’s the all-important Xenon flash, twice as powerful as the Xenon in the old Nokia N8.

Sharing options are mixed. Nokia Belle now has Facebook and Twitter support pretty much baked-in, with the PureView team rebuilding the gallery app to add a quick “Share to Facebook” button directly to the image-view screen. A sharing menu, Android-style, can be used to upload to Flickr or other third-party services, assuming there’s an app for it in the download store.

The 808 PureView probably isn’t the phone for Instagrammers, though – if you’re going to slap retro filters on your shots, then you’re unlikely to need the Nokia’s superlative image quality – which offsets its relative paucity of “feature” camera apps. That’s something that could well change in the meantime, however; Nokia has already committed to opening up access to the PureView technology to third-party app developers, which means we could see more software that takes advantage of the pixel-packing sensor. Still, the skeptics among us still suspect we won’t see PureView-centric apps reach any sort of tipping point until the first Windows Phone based Lumia PureView models reach the market.

Nokia Lumia 900 sample images:

Exactly what the timescale for that to happen is unclear, with Nokia only saying it’s a case of “when” not “if” in the future. PureView is a brand, not a specific technology – three elements of a high-performance sensor, matching high-quality optics and proprietary Nokia processing, coming together in a single device – and so the eventual Lumia PureView devices are likely to offer a bigger compromise between bulk and photographic abilities. Again, Nokia isn’t giving details, but a lower-resolution sensor and ensuing reduction in lens-bulge is pretty much certain.

We’ve come away from our early playtime with the Nokia 808 PureView just as excited about the technology as we were when the company first sprung it on us at Mobile World Congress several months ago. It’s certainly unlike anything else in the phone-camera market, which has generally chased megapixels and only recently shown any sign of putting thought into the lenses and data-crunching those sensors are paired with. If ever a phone could encourage people to reconsider Symbian, the 808 PureView is probably it, too. We’ll save our full opinions for the SlashGear review, but until then enjoy our live photo galleries!

Along the way, Nokia had to construct its own sensor production techniques, as those already in existence for cellphone cameras and even for DSLRs were supposedly insufficient for the Finns to do what they wanted. There’s also no shortage of impressive software processing, too, to harness all those millions of pixels.

If the PureView concept has passed you by, the short version is that Nokia opted to use a super-high-resolution sensor rather than to try to squeeze a complex optical zoom into its phones. Although that sensor is capable of grabbing up to 36-megapixel stills, Nokia actually envisages it being mostly used to snap 5- or 8-megapixel images. The extra-dense pixels are thus used to crop without quality loss, replicating the functionality of a zoom lens without the moving parts.

Of course, Nokia has set its sights on Windows Phone, not Nokia Belle, and so unsurprisingly the company plans to use PureView – or some iteration of it – in future handsets based on Microsoft’s platform. Exactly when that will happen is unclear at this stage.

When asked about the phone directly by PCMag, Weber said the following: “We’ll figure out a way to make that available in the U.S. in the next couple of months.” The handset would be sold unlocked and unsubsidized, and feature support for AT&T’s 3G bands. No word on if the device will also work on T-Mobile’s AWS bands.

The phone might be coming to the United States after all, but we imagine only the most die hard Nokia fans would be willing to drop a large sum of cash on an unlocked handset (~$711 in Europe), even with the 41-megapixel sensor. The PureView still hasn’t been released in Europe either, with a launch expected later this month. India and Russia will be among the first countries to be see the phone launch.

If you don’t like the idea of picking up a Symbian handset purely for the camera tech on offer, then a Windows Phone handset with the technology may be coming in the future. Nokia has hinted that they’re planning on launching a Windows Phone with the PureView tech, and a recent job listing seeking an imaging expert backs that up.

[via PocketNow]

The demonstrator got his hands on an 808 PureView and decided to test out the resolution on the camera and Carl Zeiss lens to its maximum. The results would be amazing even on an entry-level DSLR, but to see them come from a smartphone with a camera sensor smaller than a MicroSD card is downright shocking. The most dramatic example comes from a wide shot of a basketball court, which can be zoomed in on a small sign that says “Quiet After 10:00 PM” about eighty or ninety feet away. It’s truly an “enhance that” experience.

See for yourself in the video below – skip to the 3:50 mark to see the good stuff.

Are you seeing this, Nokia? Turn this sort of thing into a slick commercial and you can put Apple’s “retina” display to shame. (For a more polished video, check out Nokia’s official preview.) The 808 PureView will go on sale in Russia and India later this month, with European and other markets to follow. The Symbian device will cost around $700 in local currency when it arrives, with variations for location. Currently Nokia has not announced plans to bring the phone to the US, though it has made the obligatory stop at the FCC.

[via MyNokiaBlog]

Those 41-megapixels are used as an innovative workaround to the bulk and complexity of a traditional optical zoom. Rather than accommodate moving lenses in a phone, Nokia’s team theorized, instead use a subsection of a huge-resolution image.

Thus the target image size is actually more like 5- or 8-megapixels, with lossless zooming and post-shot cropping possible with the 808 PureView. Nokia even makes accessing it super-speedy, with the camera shortcut button loading the app in less than a second, even if the phone is locked. There’s also an optional HDMI connector kit for hooking up a big-screen TV to display photos and video.

Despite the FCC approval, however, it’s unclear whether shutterbugs in the US will get to play with the technology, at least in this device. Although the 808 PureView will launch in select markets later this month, Nokia has previously said that North America won’t get the innovative phone. Instead, they’ll have to wait for PureView technology to filter into future Windows Phones, something the company has confirmed is in the pipeline.

[via WMPoweruser]

The 808 PureView is the culmination of around five years of research and development by Nokia into the use of ultra-high-resolution sensors as an alternative to optical zooms in mobile devices. Although the handset does offer to take very detailed shots – up to 36-megapixels, in fact – Nokia expects the more common use to be grabbing 5- or 8-megapixel frames. These can be cropped from a much larger image with little loss of detail, in effect offering the zoom potential of an optical zoom but without the moving parts.

Although the old OS may prove a turn-off to many, Nokia has said that it plans to use the PureView technology – though perhaps not this exact sensor – in future Windows Phone handsets. That could prove to be a significant differentiator, not just from other Windows Phone OEMs but from rival devices from Apple, Samsung and others.

Meanwhile, Nokia and Carl Zeiss have confirmed they will extend their partnership, with the optics specialist’s lenses showing up in future handsets both PureView and otherwise. The two firms have been working together since 2005.

The video features a mixture of photos from the 808 PureView, from well lit situations to low-light scenarios too. For the most part, the photos look good, although Nokia did skim over the low-light ones a little too quick for most people to appreciate them, possibly because they’re not quite as flattering.

Sample footage shot using the 808 PureView can also be found towards the end of the video, although in our humble opinion it doesn’t fare quite as well. It looks fairly similar to what you would find on your typical smartphone, with lots of shakiness from unsteady hands to boot. Kudos to Nokia, though: most companies wouldn’t dare do the same with their own products.

The 808 PureView is expected to cost around £500 (~$805) and is expected to be released in the UK on May 14th. The handset won’t be hitting the United States, though.

[via AllAboutSymbian]

Announced to no small amount of surprise at Mobile World Congress back in February, the 808 PureView represents a groundshift in cellphone photography. Nokia spent five years developing an obscenely high-resolution sensor, figuring that rather than trying to squeeze an optical zoom into a phone, they’d grab a crazy number of pixels and then just rely on cropping to get a regular-resolution shot .

While the 808 is unlikely to be a huge seller, the PureView technology itself is headed to further models in Nokia’s range, not least future Lumia Windows Phones.

Nokia needs to push ahead sooner rather than later with its inclusion, however, if it wants to drive sales. Part of the time involved could be trimming the sensor down; back at MWC, Nokia’s imaging expert in charge of the PureView project told us that the Lumia versions might not use the exact technology in the 808, but rather be based on the same “principles” but with an eye still on compact form-factors.

IT168 note that the phone is rather chunky, and not particularly light either, but believe the assorted colours on offer (including black, white, and red) will go down well with consumers. Like others, they express concern over the pricing of the handset, rumored to be around €450 (~$600) when the phone does debut sometime in May.

Does the potentially high price tag justify the image quality coming out of that 41 megapixel sensor? In our opinion, yes. IT168 posted some sample pictures up on their website, and taking a look through them, we have to say they look excellent. Detail is strong, colors are well balanced, and there’s no signs of any pesky noise reduction or aggressive sharpening. While these aren’t full-size images, even the scaled down versions make the 808 PureView out to be the best cameraphone.

Nokia said back at MWC 2012 that it combined its knowledge of sensor technology and image scaling capabilities to try and make the best camera on a smartphone possible. Pixel oversampling means the most amount of detail possible is retained in photos, with Nokia expecting most people to shoot pictures around 8 megapixels.

[via Unwired View]

A new job advertisement shows that Nokia are looking for a senior specialist in “imaging algorithms” to work on Windows Phone. The job was posted on March 19th, and describes how Nokia is looking for someone to “be a part of a team in charge of developing the next big thing related to imaging and camera.”

In fact, the job listing specifically mentions the 808 PureView, asking if the applicant wants “to take part in creating the next chapter in Nokia’s Windows Phone devices.” You only need put two and two together to figure out Nokia is hoping to bring the same camera technology found in the 808 PureView to a Windows Phone in the future.

The number of megapixels isn’t the only story behind the 808 PureView. Nokia has combined a mix of sensor technology and scaling algorithms in order to achieve the best results out of a cameraphone possible. Nokia believe most people won’t take photos above 8 megapixels, allowing the PureView technology to capture as much extra detail as possible. Nokia showed a demo of the technology at MWC 2012, embedded below for your viewing pleasure.

[via My Nokia Blog]

Nokia doesn’t name its test setup competition, presumably out of a sense of sportsmanlike coyness, but a quick glance suggests it’s pitting the 808 PureView against the iPhone 4S, Samsung Galaxy S II and its own venerable N8. All well-respected phones for their multimedia capabilities, but the side-by-side comparisons indicate the 808 does indeed outplay them in audio.

The company claims that the difference is a broader range of sound capture and the ability to handle far louder audio: most smartphones can handle up to 110db, Nokia suggests, whereas Rich Recording goes up to 140-145db without distortion. That’s four times the loudness.

The Rich Recording tech will debut in the 808, but just like the PureView video magic should show up in future models from Nokia. Exactly when that will happen is unclear, but we honestly can’t wait for a PureView-equipped Lumia.

More on the Nokia 808 PureView in our full hands-on.

We’d already caught up with Dinning at the show last month, where he outlined how Nokia sees PureView not so much as a ridiculously-high megapixel boast but as a way to get the same outcome as an optical zoom but without accommodating moving parts or the extra bulk of multiple lenses. A cropped section of the full-resolution frame can be used instead, he explained, with the extra pixel density meaning less noise and more detail.

Nokia PureView technology:

“There were many other projects intended to include optical zoom which never made it to the market. A number of these were quite advanced concepts using different camera configurations and physical form factors, some conventional, some significantly different” Dinning says of Nokia’s camera research. “For example, at one stage we had working prototypes equipped with optical zoom using folded optics. Despite this almost reaching commercialization, the module was relatively large and we decided the performance would not be fundamentally good enough to meet the evolving expectations.”

Unfortunately, Nokia has already confirmed that the 808 PureView won’t be reaching North American shores. However, future Windows Phones will get similar PureView abilities, even if they’re not quite 41-megapixels, as Nokia extends the technology beyond the first device.

“As exciting as it may sound to introduce a device equipped with a 41-megapixel image sensor,” Dinning concludes, “our real excitement has ALWAYS been associated with the opportunities and in particular the performance this provides in its default form when shooting ‘just’ 5-megapixel images or when recording full HD video.”

That means AT&T and T-Mobile USA users should be able to drop in a SIM and get online at 3G speeds, though it seems neither carrier is going to get the opportunity to offer the smartphone officially. Nokia has offered unlocked, SIM-free devices in the US for some time now, though without the traditional subsidies they’ve been a tough sell.

Nokia 808 PureView hands-on:

The limited availability is a mixed blessing, in a way. The five year development time of PureView – which uses a super-dense CMOS sensor and custom processing algorithms for better clarity of shots – meant the Nokia imaging team responsible was forced to use Symbian; thus, the 808 PureView runs Nokia Belle, the latest iteration of that OS, rather than Windows Phone.

Still, PureView-style technology is coming to Windows Phone at some point, which should brighten up the North American market no end. More on the Nokia 808 PureView in our full hands-on.

[via PhoneArena]

Behind the lens there’s a 41-megapixel sensor and improved video autofocus, using a new “hyperfocal” system that promises less focus-hunting during video recording. A macro mode is offered in Creative Shooting mode, and there’s touch autofocus along with a full-auto mode for when you’d rather leave the 808 PureView to its own devices.

As for the image above, it shows just why you can’t get a full 41-megapixel image despite the raw capabilities of the sensor. There’s a choice between 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios, for a maximum of 38-megapixel stills when you prioritize height. The sensor itself is around 2.5x larger than the sensor in the well-esteemed N8. More information in the white paper here [pdf].

Nokia PureView technology hands-on:

You can download the full archive of Nokia 808 PureView sample shots from Nokia here [zip link] though be warned: it’s a 31.8MB download. Still, it’s worth it to see quite how capable the PureView system can be.

Nokia Lumia 610

Nokia’s entry-level Windows Phone may not have the ClearBlack AMOLED display of the Lumia 800 or the LTE of the Lumia 900, but it does have a bargain price tag. At €189 pre-tax and subsidies, it’s a new low for Microsoft’s platform – in a good way – with the promise of unlocking new markets for the company and the OS as well. Check out all our hands-on information here.

Nokia Lumia 900 DC-HSPA

Although the Lumia 900 is no stranger to us – we played with it in AT&T LTE form back at CES – this new DC-HSPA variant is fresh to MWC 2012 today. Out goes LTE and in comes Dual-Cell HSPA, using carrier aggregation in the downlink with networks that support it, with the promise of up to 42Mbps downloads, in theory at least.

No user will ever actually see that speed, but they will get to use the huge display, 8-megapixel camera with 720p HD video capture, and polycarbonate chassis in black, cyan, magenta and – fresh to MWC today – glossy white. Full hands-on details here.

Nokia Asha 202, 203 and 303

Nokia opened up the Asha range at Nokia World 2011 last year, and has three new models today. While phones “for the next billion” might not have the instant allure of the Lumia line-up, they’re testament to Nokia’s remaining strength in pushing down product pricing and delivering smartphone-style functionality in what would traditionally be feature-phones. Full details in our hands-on.

Nokia 808 PureView

The surprise stand-out of the day, we knew Nokia was readying a high-resolution cameraphone but the 41-megapixel 808 PureView still came as a huge surprise. Based on Nokia Belle, the 808 PureView offers either up to 38-megapixel stills or roughly 5- to 8-megapixel versions which pack the detail from up to eight pixels to every one in the final frame.

The end result is 1080p HD recording in which you can zoom up to four times without any loss of resolution, along with super-rich detailed images. Best of all PureView technology is coming to more than just the 808, though Nokia is keeping quiet on exact product plans. Find our full hands-on here along with details on how the system works here.

Nokia 808 PureView hands-on:

Nokia Drive and Nokia Transport

Nokia Drive has been a fixture of Nokia Windows Phones from the start, but MWC brought an update with offline mapping and more. Meanwhile, there’s the new Nokia Transport app, bringing real-time public transportation information to the homescreen of your Lumia. Full details in our hands-on.

Nokia Transport hands-on:

Nokia Reading and Groupon

Nokia Reading joins the existing Nokia apps preloaded to Lumias, pulling in news feeds in an easy-to-consume way on your smartphone. The Groupon deal, meanwhile, integrates the daily-deals service into an updated version of Nokia Maps.

“We have changed the clock-speed of Nokia” CEO Stephen Elop said at the opening of his keynote. From the look of today’s line-up, that certainly seems to be the case.

HTC’s approach has been speed and usable quality. The new One Series – the One X, One S and One V - each use HTC’s refreshed camera technology, homegrown expertise that makes for a faster booting snapper and one which focuses quicker. The company claims its new phones are ready to take a shot in 0.7 seconds, with autofocus locking on faster than the blink of an eye; it also says that it’s market research indicates camera resolution is the first thing consumers look at to differentiate between potential new device purchases.

We’ve seen fast phone cameras before – the Galaxy Nexus is a good example, often producing blurry images along the way – but HTC is working slightly differently. The company has also used a Backside-Illuminated sensor, paired with an f2.0 lens for all-round improved low-light performance. Meanwhile it has its own image processing chip (somewhat uninspiringly named the HTC Image Chip) that carries out color correction and other tweaks on RAW image files, prior to conversion to JPEG. It’s a different order to how most smartphones have handled photography.

Nokia PureView technology:

Nokia, too, is shaking things up from the status quo in stills and video. The Nokia 808 PureView debuts the spoils of five years of research by the company’s imaging experts, a combination of lens, processing algorithms and a whopping 41-megapixel sensor. At first glance it would be easy to dismiss Nokia as chasing the numbers game, but in actual fact PureView is resolutely not about pushing out images at the far end of the resolution scale but using them to create far better shots at more traditional levels.

We’ve already described how impressed we are with PureView – and the technology’s potential for future implications – but overall it’s a reassuring sign that the smartphone industry isn’t resorting to old tropes  in its hunger for the next big differentiator. Could it be that manufacturers are waking up to the fact that there’s more to cameras than how many megapixels you can write on the spec card in the store display? Based on what we’ve seen so far at MWC 2012, it certainly looks that way – now they just have to convince customers to base their decisions on more than just a few blunt numbers.

PureView isn’t just about Nokia’s 41-megapixel sensor: it’s a combination of three areas, the sensor, the Carl Zeiss optics and the company’s proprietary imaging algorithms. In the 808 PureView those algorithms get a processor of their own to use, Nokia’s Head of Imaging Damien Dinning tells us, which is what allows it to crunch a billion pixels a second.

Carl Zeiss’ lenses have been used in Nokia phones on several occasions, but here they’re tasked with a camera that, while it lacks an optical zoom, has to deliver super-crisp digital zooms. Meanwhile, the sensor itself although branded 41-megapixels, is really designed to produce incredible smaller shots. Although you can switch into a manual mode and output up to 38-megapixel frames, Nokia is expecting most users to stay within the 2-megapixel to 8-megapixel band. That allows the PureView technology to use all the extra pixels – around eight per final pixel in a 5MP image – to grab extra detail and increase overall accuracy.

Nokia PureView demo:

Bizarrely, despite all that extra detail, Nokia’s final images are surprisingly small. A 5-megapixel frame is, on average, 1MB in size: that’s because Nokia uses a new system of compression that, it says, results in smaller shots by leaving out the details other cameras include but shouldn’t. For instance, in JPEGs with black and white sections abutting, where other cameras would leave you with a column of grey tones between them, the 808 PureView will leave a crisp pixel-accurate line.

That adds up to no lost detail but no extraneous murk either, hence the smaller file sizes. Video, too, is smaller, and it’s arguably low-light detail in which PureView shows its hand. Nokia showed us a video shot with the 808 PureView at a concert, complete with bright on-stage lighting, dry ice and otherwise gloom, and the detail was legitimately astonishing. Rather than washing out the entire frame, the powerful stage lights were crisply edged, shining sharply through the mist, while other less powerful spots were equally visible. On-stage detail of the dancers was also clear.

Nokia 808 PureView hands-on:

Dinning admits that the 41-megapixel branding is in part an attention-grab to give it a head-start in stores. According to the imaging chief, whether or not to brand the 808 PureView with its pixel count has been a hotly discussed topic at Nokia, with the final decision being that if the company didn’t mention it, others still would. Nokia’s N8 saw a fair number of sales from photography-obsessed cellphone shoppers voicing that interest to salespeople and being directed to the 12-megapixel Symbian device as it was “the best smartphone camera experience” apparently, and Nokia hopes to catch a few more with a similar method.

Future devices will see some form of PureView technology integrated. As Dinning told us, Nokia didn’t spend five years working on the system to only use it in a single device. Still, a 41-megapixel Windows Phone probably isn’t on the cards, at least not yet. What we’re likely to see are the algorithms and the idea of cropping a high-resolution slice of an even larger image carried over into other phones, with fewer megapixels but also a generally smaller phone overall. There’s no denying the 808 PureView’s bulk, though that does at least help accommodate a Xenon flash.

It’s easy to get blasé about technology. All too often we hear smartphone manufacturers talking about how their camera boots a few milliseconds faster, or takes shots with an extra megapixel. Nokia’s PureView, though, despite having the highest megapixel rating of any phone camera around, perversely is the first to shift the phone-camera discussion away from pure pixel count. Instead, it’s what you can do with those images – crop out multiple zoomed frames from a single still, zoom into Full HD video without any loss of 1080p quality – that becomes important. It’s potentially the best technology we’ve seen at Mobile World Congress so far.

Still, that also accommodates a Xenon flash, which we’re always appreciative of, and the 808 PureView will also shoot Full HD video with Dolby Digital Plus audio. An HDMI port on the top edge – next to a 3.5mm headphone socket – handles video output to your big-screen or projector. The 808 PureView also debuts Rich Recording, audio recording at CD-like levels of quality.

In the hand, it’s beefy but responsive, even running non-final software. The camera app is straightforward to use, but you also get crop and other editing tools in the gallery app. Otherwise it’s mostly Belle as we saw it on the Nokia 700, a huge improvement over earlier versions of Symbian with its Android-esque stylings.

You’ll never actually get a 41-megapixel shot – the sensor is square, so if you have a landscape shot you get a 34-megapixel picture, and the biggest image you’ll ever get is 38-megapixels. However, Nokia is really positioning the uber-optics as a way to work around the absence of a zoom; we cropped down a full-res shot – all on-camera – and ended up with a very high resolution close-up. In video, the extra pixels are used to deliver a 4x digital zoom that’s effectively lossless.

Nokia 808 PureView hands-on:

Make no mistake, this is a niche device. The original N8 was Nokia’s attempt at a smartphone flagship that also delivered incredible picture quality; now, with Windows Phone as the company’s primary focus, the 808 PureView can be Nokia’s megapixel mistress, providing photographic titillation for those not onboard the Microsoft train.

Nokia says there’s no shortage of pixel-crunching tech to make sure all those megapixel aren’t wasted, and based on some of the cropped shots we’ve just seen in the demo we can almost believe them. There’s also Dolby Digital Plus audio recording, with HDMI output.

Nokia Belle has already quietly impressed us with its Android-style interface, and the 41-megapixels of the 808 Pure View certainly has us curious. The 808 Pure View will go on sale priced at around €450 pre-tax and subsidies in May.