Nokia continued its comeback into the smartphone market last week with the unveiling of the new Nokia 808 PureView, the first to feature the Finnish company’s new PureView camera technology together with a 41-megapixel camera .
The 808 has a 1/1.2-inch sensor, which is considerably larger than the average camera phone sensor, a 6x digital zoom, and a Carl Zeiss lens with an aperture of f2.4 that shoots in continuous focus HD video, at 1080p.
Although it’s technically got 41 megapixels on the sensor, the 808 shoots pictures up to 38 megapixels, in 4:3, or at 34 megapixels in 16:9. Users also have the option of snapping at a more level-headed 3, 5 or 8 megapixels.
Other non-camera features include a 1.3GHz processor, 16GB of storage and a 4″ touchscreen display with 360×640 resolution.
Software-wise, the smartphone surprisingly runs Nokia’s much-maligned Symbian software – albeit an updated version called Symbian Belle – and not the more advanced Windows Phone OS, which powers most of the company’s latest handsets .
Mary McDowell, Nokia’s executive vice president for mobile phones, said that the firm’s engineers had been working on the 808 “for years”.
She said it was “natural” to assume that its technology would be used in future Nokia products, but declined to be drawn specifically on whether it was “when or if” the company would produce a Windows Phone with such imaging capabilities.
The Nokia 808 PureView was announced last week at Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona, and is expected to go on sale in Europe in May at around €450 (£375) SIM-free .
