No, that’s not a typo. I did not mean to type 14 megapixels in that headline there. It indeed is 41 (forty one) megapixels. Anyway, let me inform you all what this is all about. At the on going Mobile World Congress at Barcelona, Spain, Nokia has made one of the most outrageous announcements ever seen in the mobile industry. Perhaps this might turn out to be the most significant advancement in mobile imaging technology since 2002 when the first of the cameraphones started rolling out.
Lest I go on talking gibberish about this, let me talk about the new launch in detail. We are talking about the Nokia 808 PureView – a quite unassuming looking smartphone that runs the “dead” Symbian OS – albeit the renamed, sexed up version of the same called Belle.
The talking point about this phone is undoubtedly its camera and the technology that has gone behind it. The PureView 808 gets a “large, high-resolution 41 megapixel sensor with high-performance Carl Zeiss optics and new pixel oversampling technology.” as Nokia puts it. That’s right my friend, the phone actually has a sensor that can capture images at 41 megapixels in size. While it might be ridiculous for anyone to capture images at that size, users can take images up to 38 megapixels in size and look for a picture in the large picture. What this huge sensor does give the phone is the ability to capture details that no camera phone has ever been able to – until now.
Now if you are wondering how Nokia managed to do this seemingly impossible task, well, let us tell you that in reality, the phone makes use of some very smart (like really smart) “over-sampling” techniques that runs a magic wand on the pixels – grouping seven of them together which go on to become a super-pixel. The phone also gets the ability to film full HD videos with 4x zoom and that too, lossless. If you choose to record in 720p, you can zoom without any loss up to 6x! In the still image mode, you can zoom 3x times! The 808 also becomes the first Nokia handset to feature high-definition audio recording which the company claims can produce CD quality sounds. If that was not all, it features Dolby Digital Plus too.
For technical details on how Nokia has managed to pull this off, you might want to read this whitepaper here
Other more phone like features of the device includes a 1.3GHz processor, 16GB of internal user memory, with support for MicroSD cards up to 32GB and a 4 inch clear black display with a resolution of 640*360! Yes, that should remind you that this is still a Symbian device.
The 808 PureView would be made available by May 2012 for a price of about 450 Euros.
