Nokia 808 PureView To Launch First in India And Russia, This May

Nokia has announced it will begin rolling out the Nokia 808 PureView cameraphone in select markets in May. The Finnish mobile giant also announced that India, and Russia, will be the first two markets to get the PureView on retail shelves.

The Symbian Belle-based Nokia 808 PureView, or PureView 808 as it was first known, stole the show when it was unveiled at MWC 2012, receiving the Best Mobile Device award at the prestigious event.

Even in our own ThinkDigit Weekly Poll, which asked readers “Which top-end smartphone unveiled at MWC do you most fancy?” the Nokia 808 PureView won out, displacing the quad-core processor powered flagships – the LG Optimus 4X HD, HTC One X (read our review), and Huawei Ascend D Quad – at least in terms of reader interest.

In the meanwhile, the Nokia 808 PureView has also won the award for Best Imaging Innovation for 2012 from the Technical Image Press Association (TIPA). Jo Harlow, Head of Smart Devices at Nokia, spoke about the importance of the device in the entire smartphone industry, saying:

“PureView has completely raised the bar on imaging performance for the whole smartphone industry - and Nokia is not stopping here. We’re going to carry on developing PureView for our future smartphones in ways that will again revolutionize the imaging experience.”

The Nokia 808 PureView features an extra-large 41MP sensor, along with high-performance Carl Zeiss optics and new pixel oversampling technology. Offering a maximum image resolution of 38MP, the Nokia 808 PureView’s camera sensor condenses 7 adjacent pixels into one, downsizing it to an extra-sharp and light-sensitive 5MP or 8MP image. Max image quality at 4:3 aspect is 38 MP, while at 16:9 aspect is 34 MP.

The Nokia 808 PureView also features a built-in Xenon flash, alongside a LED light for video. It can handle 1080p HD video recording at 30 fps, with stereo sound, and 4x zoom. Nokia has also included the Nokia Rich Recording feature, which enables audio recording at CD-like levels of quality, previously only possible with external microphones. It also comes with Dolby Headphone technology, transforming stereo content into a personal surround sound experience over any headphones and Dolby Digital Plus for 5.1 channel surround sound playback.

While all this probably makes the Nokia 808 PureView the greatest cameraphone to date, Nokia has decided not to put too much juice into the rest of the phone’s specifications – it features a relatively low-resolution 640x360 pixel Gorilla Glass AMOLED display, albeit with a 16:9 display.

Other specifications include a single-core 1.3GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, 16GB built-in storage, USB-on-the-Go, Bluetooth 3.0, HSDPA 14.4Mbps, HSUPA 5.76Mbps, Wi-Fi N with DLNA, GPS and A-GPS, stereo FM radio, and even NFC connectivity.