Inside Nokia’s newly announced N9 is a 1 GHz Texas Instruments OMAP3630 with a PowerVR SGX530 GPU and an 8 megapixel camera. Compared the dual core superphones that are already out on the market, it isn’t the fastest device on the planet, but Nokia thinks they’ve optimized the N9 so well that when it eventually does hit store shelves it’ll have the fastest camera to ever be put inside a phone. In a recent Nokia Conversations blog post the chart below was shared and it claims that the N9 can capture a photo 2.6 seconds after the camera application is launched, compared to 3 seconds for Apple’s iPhone 4, and up to 8.3 seconds for the Windows Phone powered HTC HD7. Curiously enough, Nokia doesn’t bother to compare the N9 to the N8 Nokia compares the N9 to the N8 in the middle of the chart, which has held the title of “Best Cameraphone Ever” since it hit store shelves in October of last year. Is it because the N8 might be even faster? We don’t have one on hand to test.
It’s a bit premature to congratulate Nokia since we’ve yet to see any N9 image samples, that and there’s a lot that can happen between now and whenever the N9 actually becomes available; we’ve been hearing rumors about a limited launch in September. The elephant in the room in Apple’s next generation iPhone, which rumors suggest will pack an 8 megapixel camera. But then there’s also HTC, who is rumored to be bringing a 16 megapixel beast of a Windows Phone to market by the end of this year, as well as a Windows Phone with a 12 megapixel camera that can also capture images in RAW format.
Competition is always a good thing and while we do applaud Nokia for taking photo capturing seriously longer than just about anyone else on the market, we’ve got to admit that the competition is finally starting to take notice.
[Image at the top of this article via Flickr user “HellMichael”]