devilx science

Last week Nokia released a teaser video telling us all to get ready for something called ‘PureView’. Now we know what it is the company were referring to: The Nokia 808 PureView, a Symbian-powered handset with a ridiculous 41-Megapixel sensor. What the what?! 41-Megapixels? Read on for the full details, straight out of Mobile World Congress 2012.

The Nokia 808 PureView is now the best camera phone in the world, hands-down. Its Carl Zeiss lens kicks into gear in less than a second and it records video in full HD, but that’s not why you’re reading, is it? You want to know about those 41-Megapixels.

Nokia’s pulled off a bit of magic, there. Basically, in practice the sensor produces images about 5-Megapixels big, but it does so by way of some clever trickery: each pixel also gets information from its seven neighbouring pixels.

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That info gets condensed down to provide the overall 5-Meg image, but the effect is that your image has almost no noise whatsoever because it’s crammed full of information. The result is up to poster-sized images with absolutely immense detail.

Other than that pretty bulky camera pack on the 808 PureView’s rear and a world-first Dolby Digital surround sound audio output, you’re looking at a fairly standard Symbian Belle offering, in a similar mould to the Nokia N8. There’s a 4-inch ClearBlack display, 16GB of storage, a 1.3GHz single-core processor (with 512MB of RAM), HDMI output and proprietary software such as Nokia Maps.

The 808 PureView will be available in black, white and red when it lands. Are you sold on the camera but not the Symbian OS? Nokia’s hinted that the PureView tech may make it to Windows Phone at some point in the future.