Up until this moment Nokia N8 was the best camera phone on the planet. No more; a new device, also made by the Finnish company, took that crown from the N8 – Nokia 808 PureView. It comes with a 41-megapixel sensor, Nokia (Symbian) Belle OS, HSPA, Wi-Fi, etc. – you can read the specs in a separate post. Here we want to briefly describe you how it feels to hold such device in your hand.
First of all, it’s made out of hard plastic a la Nokia N9. The back of the phone is where all the magic happens, with camera and its huge sensor taking a prominent place. Moreover, there are also both LED and Xenon flash on the back, first of which is used for taking videos.
The 4-inch AMOLED screen dominates the front of the device, and here you’ll also find a (front-facing) camera along with three buttons below the display. On the top, there’s an HDMI out and 3.5mm headset jack, while all other buttons are located on one side of the phone, including volume keys (that also work like zoom in/out in the camera app), lock/unlock key and camera start/snap button.
The device is 13.9 mm thick at the thinnest point and 17.95 mm at the thickest point. That may doesn’t sound promising, but if you’ve been using the N8 for some time, this won’t bother you; in any case you’ll adjust quickly.
Overall we like the Nokia 808 PureView and are also hoping this imaging technology will soon be transferred to Windows Phone. With Microsoft’s marketing behind such a product, their platform may actually have some chance competing with Android… or not. We’ll see how that goes, and while we wait for the market forces to do their magic, enjoy the photos of the world’s most powerful camera phone.