Johannesburg, 02 Mar 2012
Nokia's 808 Pureview has scooped up the 'Best of Show' award at the Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona, for the best new mobile handset, device or tablet at the show. Last year, the iPhone 4 took the award, despite Apple not being present at the event.
The 808 Pureview was one of the big surprises of the show as Nokia wowed the industry with the whopping 41MP camera phone. While the specs of the smartphone are not expected to make the handset a big seller, Nokia has hinted that it will introduce the Pureview technology to other future devices (analysts say Windows Phone would be an obvious choice).
The 808 Pureview runs the Symbian Belle platform and has a four-inch screen with 512MB RAM and a 1.3GHz single-core processor. The handset has only an nHD 640x360 display. The camera phone will reportedly go on sale in May.
Executive VP of smart devices for Nokia, Jo Harlow, says: “These are first signals that we are executing against our strategy. That we're back. That we're bringing great products to our consumers - and that this is just the beginning. There's lot more to come.”
Explaining how the Pureview technology works, Nokia says it is not about taking images the size of billboards, but rather creating higher quality pictures at normal sizes that are manageable for a smartphone.
Oversampling
As explained by Nokia Conversations' Ian Delaney: “The technology means that taking typically sized shots (say, five megapixels) the camera can use oversampling to combine up to seven pixels into one “pure” pixel, eliminating the visual noise found on other mobile phone cameras.”
Users can also capture an image at a high resolution of 38MP, then reframe, crop and zoom before saving the image to the phone. Nokia has posted examples of the photos that can be taken on the new handset on its Flickr channel (the featured pictures were coincidently taken in South Africa).
The 808 Pureview beat out some stiff competition to take the top prize at the Mobile World Congress. Other devices shortlisted included the Galaxy Note 10.1 from Samsung, HTC's One Series phone, Huawei's Ascend D quad-core smartphone and the Asus PadFone.
Other winners at this year's Mobile World Congress were Angry Birds Rio (Best Mobile App for Consumers), WhatsApp (Best Overall Mobile App), Samsung SII (Best Smartphone), Samsung (Device Manufacturer of the Year) and the iPad 2 (Best Mobile Tablet).
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