Nokia 808 PureView

The Nokia808 PureView is nothing but a “innovation flagship”. There is no better explanation or a title for it. While Nokia was busy moving away from all their legacy onto Windows Phone, they felt they needed to showcase their innovation quickly, quick enough to salvage some pride as the cash reserve and the stock prices were tumbling for the worse. Exactly an year after announcing that they are moving away from the legacy, especially Symbian, they showed the world, the last true Symbian flagship device, the Nokia 808 PureView. Let’s quickly look at the highlights of this device -

Key Photographic/Video Specifications

38MP maximum resolution (in 4:3 aspect ratio - output size: 7728 x 5368 pixels)

1/1.2" CMOS sensor, pixel size: 1.4um

ISO 80-1600 (+ auto)

Five white balance presets (including auto)

Exposure compensation +/-4EV in 0.3EV steps

Carl Zeiss F2.4 8.02mm lens (26mm, 16:9 | 28mm, 4:3 equiv)

Focus range: 15cm – Infinity (throughout the zoom range)

Construction:

5 elements, 1 group. All lens surfaces are aspherical

One high-index, low-dispersion glass mould lens

Mechanical shutter with neutral density filter

1080p HD video (up to 25Mb/s) with 4X 'lossless zoom'

Stereo recording with Nokia Rich Recording - rated up to 140db

As you can see above, there is not much going for the Nokia 808 PureView besides its camera prowess. But the camera is what Nokia wanted to show and that’s why we are talking about it. The camera is undoubtedly the best smartphone camera you can ever find, and it bests every other cameraphone out there. It even rivals various point and shoot cameras and puts them to shame. Such is the power of the Nokia 808 PureView and it was definitely a market disruption, much like the Galaxy Note. Not a single smartphone has come close to its image quality till now, and the video and audio departments are no less impressive.

We've been eager to gets our hands on an 808 since the phone was announced and a loan sample finally arrived in our Seattle office recently. We've been using it ever since. Please note though that this article doesn't touch on the 808 PureView's performance as a phone. That's not what interests us. We want to see what it's like as a camera...