A few months ago, Nokia showed us a concept phone that had more strength as a camera than a lot of compact digital cameras have. Now Nokia has said that more phones with this feature might be on the way.
Easily the biggest surprise of Nokia’s announcement at Mobile World Congress in February, the 808 PureView was announced as a smartphone that could take high resolution images on a 41 megapixel sensor.
Most cameras – even in the digital SLR space – don’t have sensors that high, and yet this was Nokia’s answer to providing effective zoom in a phone without needing excessive moving parts. Effectively, the phone would just zoom closer into the 41 megapixel frame and provide a 5 megapixel image, cropping the image down instead of blowing the pixels up in digital zoom.
The bad news is that Nokia has yet to announce availability for this potential camera-replacing phone, but the good news is that the company is planning to make more.
Originally, the 808 PureView was built for Symbian, the older operating system Nokia essentially gave up when it joined forces with Microsoft. Now, with the Lumia series of handsets making their way out with Windows Phone 7.5, it’s very likely that the newer PureViews will arrive with Microsoft’s OS in the near future.
