Hands on: Nokia PureView 808

Nokia today officially launched its PureView 808 smartphone, which runs on the Nokia Belle platform and features a humungous 41-megapixel camera sensor. While, Nokia does not claim to provide anything ground-breaking in the standard specs of the device, its camera has polarized opinion among technology journalists. We went hands down with the device, read on for more.

Right off the bat, the device features a 4-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 640×320 pixels which frankly is shockingly below par for a phone that costs Rs 33,899. That said, Nokia uses its ClearBlack filter on top, which improves things a lot. While using the device at the Nokia event, we compared it with the Samsung Galaxy S II, which has a much higher WVGA resolution, and we could not discern a significant difference between the sharpness of text and icons between the two devices. We will test this in detail once we review the device.
The device admittedly felt a tad bulky, largely due to the giant camera sensor housed in the rear of the device, but Nokia has employed tasteful curves and contours on the device which lend the device a very comfortable in hand feel. Nokia has even used very high quality plastics in the construction of the PureView 808. While, it does not feature the brilliant unibody exterior of the Lumia 800, it does indeed offer a similar feel in hand. Perhaps, Nokia has used the same polycarbonate in construction of the device, though we are yet to confirm this.
The UI generally is Nokia Belle. Powered by a 1.3GHz processor and 512MB of RAM, the device does feel more nimble than previous Symbian powered smartphones, but frankly there is no escaping the pitfalls of the Symbian UI, which involves use of multiple unintuitive  steps in the navigation of simple tasks. The bottom line is that the Symbian platform just does not cut it in 2012. It is lightyears behind iOS, Android and even Windows Phone, in every conceivable way.
Now that all the regular stuff is out of the way, let’s talk about the PureView camera. We don’t even have to test the device in great detail to tell you that it is the best camera phone in the world by a long shot. The device reproduces incredible shots and mind you at very fast speeds. We did not find jargons like ‘Zero Shutter lag’ but the speed of the PureView camera came very close to the modern brigade of droids in the market. In the demo, a Nokia executive took an image of a person’s shirt and with the camera he was able to zoom in to such a degree, that we were able to see the individual threads in the shirt. Another demo, showed a long shot of a plane flying and image was zoomed to such a degree that the Kingfisher Airlines branding was clearly visible.

We tested the camera ourselves, and boy it lived up to the hype. We took a few shots in low light conditions and the results were nothing short of spectacular. We found a plethora of customization options in the camera UI and in terms of functionality the UI was right up there with the best, with the HTC One X, perhaps being the only one having a better UI.
Even HD video on the PureView 808 was magnificent. Again, we tested the device in an environment that frankly was not conducive for photography. However, the results were pretty impressive and more importantly the audio was also crisp. Nokia claims that the device can reproduce CD quality audio from video and the device can handily sound up to 140 DB. Obviously, we were not able to test this in great detail, but given the environment, the results were impressive.
All-in-all, the PureView 808 is shaping up to be the best camera phone in the market, but at the same-time due to its lackluster operating system, it’s not even close in the battle for the best smartphone and things get worst when we put the price in the equation. Of course, this is not our final opinion on the device as we will run it through the BGR India test cycles before we give our definitive opinion on the device. In the meanwhile, wait on for our review of the Nokia PureView 808.