This phone seemed nothing short of a dream come true for any remaining Symbian fans -- all 3 of us! Prior to its introduction at MWC last February, I was getting a bit dismayed by the lack of good choices out there. I was getting bored with my aging
Nokia N8 from 2010, but almost 2 years later, nothing else could match its camera, its offline navigation, its connectivity options, or - this may be a bit of a surprise if you read too many blogs - its usability. The prospects of another bone thrown our way from Nokia were pretty slim too: In 2011 Nokia's new CEO, Microsoft lackey Stephen Elop, gave the Symbian OS the death sentence and instead hijacked the company as a tool to use in a last ditch (futile) attempt to promote Windows Phone, thus _instantly_ killing off Nokia's then-40+% share of the global smartphone market.
Then - out of nowhere - came the 808 PureView! My first reaction was "Holy Cow! 41 Megapixels -- why? Talk about megapixel race gone awry! And on Symbian, to boot!". Turns out, there are good reasons for both the pixel resolution and the OS choice - more on that below. Suffice it to say, I can't remember having been this excited about a new phone since... well... the N8. I simply could not wait for the official US release here on Amazon, and instead purchased the black version from an importer - warranty be damned! Of course, more sane individuals will want to get the US version here instead. :)
UPDATE Oct 4, 2012: It is with a heavy heart that I now have removed two stars from my original 5-star rating. The phone overall is spectacular: The camera, Nokia Maps, and the build quality in particular. However, there is a very serious bug that causes spurious loss of connectivity or reboots when connecting to certain 3.5G (HSDPA) cells -- see the "Bugs" section below for details. The bottom line is that I had to disable HSDPA, and now get only "plain old" 3G (UMTS) download speeds. While this works OK for light "day to day" use, including live streaming with Nokia Internet radio or downloading podcasts in the background, it becomes noticeably slow as an internet device (or tethered gateway for another device).
UPDATE April 26, 2013: After ten months, hundreds of theories/speculations about the cause, one repair, two more 808 PureView's purchased/returned, and even two unsuccessful attempts at tolerating Android - the issue seems to have been magically fixed! Yes, that's right - fixed!
Nokia has quietly released a "3G compatibility update" via their Software Update application, though unfortunately not for US customers yet. See comment #75 below for a direct link to the installer. With this update installed, the reboots seem to magically have gone away! And just like that, 808 PureView is finally the dream phone it promised to be!
Back to 5 stars, cheaper data plan, and a happier life. :)
=======================
Camera, Camera, Camera!
=======================
The camera is obviously the main attraction, and is in itself is worth the money. If the 808 were sold as a standalone camera, it would handily beat just about every point-and-shoot camera out there. Even when shooting at 5MP or 8MP, it easily outclasses even more "pro" compacts such as the
Canon G12.
The one seeming deficiency that the 808 PureView would have when compared to those dedicated camera is a lack of optical zoom. This, clearly, has to do with size - there is no way to fit in the optics required, especially when considering the sheer size of the photo sensor included with this phone. To give you an idea, the sensor is twice the size of the G12, whose 5x optical zoom already gives it a 2-inch thick body when retracted. And compared to most "ultra-zoom" cameras (such as the
Canon SX IS series), the sensor in the 808 is 3-4 times as large!
Enter the genius of Nokia's "PureView" technology. This gives you, among other things, "Lossless" digital zoom. (Yeah there are quotes, I'll get back to why).
At full resolution, pictures taken with this phone consist of 34 or 38 megapixels (in 16:9 and 4:3 aspect ratios, respectively). At that resolution, the size of each pixel is equivalent to that of recent 8MP smart phones such as the iPhone 4S or the Samsung Galaxy series. Obviously, photos from those phones can be a bit... meeh... especially in low light conditions. So yeah, scaling up from 8MP of random noise to 38MP of random noise is not really the value proposition Nokia was going for here.
Instead, in "PureView" mode, you will be capturing 8MP, 5MP or even 2MP photos - and you will be impressed at how much information is available despite the lower resolution, and at the color "depth" that comes with a much wider dynamic range. You'll truly appreciate how it's not the pixel count that matters, the quality of each pixel. You'll even feel a little bit more smug vis a vis those poor souls who still believe more MPs == better pictures.
The idea is that by "binning" several pixels (photo cells) together into larger "super-pixels", each resulting pixel receives more light (signal), whereas most of the noise associated with shifting and reading the signal from the CCD remains constant. In turn, this means less noise per resulting pixel, shorter exposure times, less blur. Less noise also means more efficient compression, resulting in even smaller file sizes (despite the cleaner picture!).
So why not simply use a cheaper 5MP or 8MP sensor then? So long as the total sensor area is the same, wouldn't you get the same benefits?
There are at least two reasons for this. First, would you even be looking at this phone it it was marketed with a "5 Megapixel Camera"? For all that we decry the marketing race for higher megapixel numbers despite the resulting deterioration in image quality, we are still allowing ourselves to be fooled by it. By placing a "41 Megapixel" label on this thing, Nokia is essentially using metrics that give you a fairly accurate representation of its camera performance vis a vis other smart phones in the market today. (Update April 2013: Manufacturers are getting smarter: The HTC One, at 4 MP, borrows some concepts from the Nokia/PureView playbook).
The second reason is that this allows for the aforementioned "lossless" digital zoom. In other smart phones (with the exception of video recording modes on the
Nokia N8,
Sony Ericsson C905a, and a couple of others), once you start to zoom in, you are in effect "scaling up" an image from its native pixel resolution, just as you would if you enlarged a picture in an image editing program. You are not adding any detail, you are only blurring the original.
In contrast, the 808 digital zoom works by reducing the size of each "super-pixel", down all the way to its native resolution. So at the far end of the zoom range, you are essentially using only the center portion of the sensor, cropped such that 1 photo cell corresponds exactly to 1 pixel in the resulting image. In simplified terms, you could say that you reduce or eliminate the "oversampling" that PureView otherwise provides.
This, combined with the phone's aspheric lens design and other ingenious solutions, allows for optical performance way its physical size would normally indicate. In fact, in a side-by-side blind test conducted by GSMArena.com, it went on to score higher than the
Olympus PEN E-PL2 interchangeable lens (DSLR-like) camera with its "four thirds" inch photo sensor (about 2.5x larger than that of the 808). Granted, these were mostly daytime/outdoor photos at the wide range etc etc -- but the fact that this can even happen speaks volumes!
One thing I have not yet mentioned is the awesome video and audio recording quality of this phone. Unless you have professional video recording equipment usually reserved for movie studios and broadcasters, there is nothing else no the market that matches the richness in both video and sound (frequency range, dynamic range) that this thing gives.
============================
The perfect travel companion
============================
If you are traveling, this is really the one gadget you want to bring with you! Some reasons:
* The camera - obviously! You can safely leave your compact digital camera or camcorder at home.
* Nokia Maps. Free navigation, phenomenal map/POI coverage. Unlike Google Maps, map data is stored in vector format, so it is much less data intensive (both for download and storage). In fact, data can be stored offline beforehand, so you don't need any data connection at all to use it.
* Other preinstalled Nokia applications, such as Nokia Guides (city guides, restaurant guides, etc) and Nokia Public Transport (very nice and useful if looking for public transit options near you).
* Worldwide 3G coverage. This is one of very few phones, like the N8 before it, that has penta-band UMTS network support, meaning it works on any GSM carrier's 3G network worldwide (including both AT&T and T-Mobile USA).
* Multiple ways to connect to TV sets to share photos, videos, etc, including HMDI, DNLA, and plain old RGB output for analogue TVs.
Read more ›