Say what you want about iOS, Android, or Windows Phone, and how each of those platforms have their respective strengths and weaknesses. For those folks who simply want the best camera phone on the market, Nokia’s been targeting that audience since the N90 started shipping in Q2 2005 thanks to the combination of the company’s total control over Symbian and their use of Carl Zeiss optics. Over time the competition has gotten better, we don’t deny that for a minute, just look at the images that Samsung’s Galaxy S II produces. That being said, the best camera phone on the market today is without question the Nokia N8. This author even purchased one for his girlfriend for her birthday last month, in pink! Now that Nokia has switched to using Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system, we’re starting to wonder when the Finnish handset maker will outdo themselves yet again and release an even better imaging device?
According to various sources who have spoken to Unwired View, Nokia will indeed be coming out with a device that’ll run laps around the Nokia N8, but get this … it’s going to run the now deprecated Symbian OS. Said device doesn’t have a name yet, but here’s what we know so far: huge camera sensor (no word on how many megapixels, but that really doesn’t matter anyway), optical zoom, 3.5 inch Gorilla Glass display with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels (a first for Symbian), 1 GHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, and a Q2 2012 launch date. Now the N8 came out in Q3 2010, so 6 quarters later (~ 18 months) for a successor is about right, but honestly, Symbian?
Stephen Elop became the CEO of Nokia in September of last year, the exact same time the N8 came out, and likely when the sucessor of said smartphone was still nothing more than a sketch in a PowerPoint presentation. So why didn’t Elop kill it? One theory that we’d like to propose is that Nokia still doesn’t have the expertise in tweaking Windows Phone to give them the type of optical performance they need, so this N8 successor will live a life similar to that of the N9. It’ll be made so that the logistics folks can learn how to best make it, and then in the future Nokia will release a version of the device, with the exact same look and feel, running Windows Phone.
What do you think?