Nokia 808 PureView Review | The 41MP Camera Phone Maestro

Earlier at Mobile World Congress 2012 Nokia announced and showcased their ‘game changer’ device, the Nokia 808 PureView. And in terms of camera specs it truly is a monster device which can easily out play many high end digital cameras that are currently available in the market. The Nokia 808 Pure View is a powerhouse of a camera phone with a monstrous 41MP camera and it includes all the other features that are available in any high end Nokia Symbian smartphones.

Design:

The 808 pure view is fat, bulky phone with a smooth plastic ‘metallic-like’ exterior. The resulting grip is not bad at all, it is rather non-slippery and quite frankly it fits your hand nicely when you are holding it. However when it comes to elegant and sophistication  in terms of its physical design it loses out. No my friend, it is not competing in the good looking smartphones category and it is not ashamed to express that. If you take a look at the backside of the Nokia 808 your eyes will automatically focus towards the monster camera covering nearly half the phone’s own height. But it is to be expected when such a powerhouse camera (at 123.9mm x 60.2mm x 13.9mm) is equipped right within the phone. There is also a secondary camera built in over the display beside the proximity sensor which you can use for making video calls. At this point it is important to let you know that since the backside of the smartphone is not a flat like the Nokia N8, it does not rest firmly on any flat surface (like on tables, dashboard etc).

The topside of the phone includes a port for the headphone jack, a nicely tucked away HDMI out and the microUSB slot for data transfers. The bottom side of the phone itself is quite clean and only includes one tiny opening for recording the sounds via the microphone. It is also responsible for recording the crystal clear sound when you are recording a video with its extra powerful camera.

The right side of the phone includes a couple of metallic finish buttons and a dedicated lock/unlock plastic key. The first metallic button is responsible for controlling the volume of the device in various modes and the other is a dedicated quick launch button for the camera. The left side of the phone is totally clean.

The phone’s 4 inch AMOLED display is protected by the Gorilla Glass which also keeps the contrast ratio balanced when viewing single photos under bright light and even when viewing the menu in broad daylight. On the front side there are two sturdy looking, high quality buttons for receiving and rejecting calls with a central menu button in between them to navigate your phone’s system.

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The Symbian Belle FP1 Interface:

Symbian Belle FP1 is built in within the phone and it includes almost all the stuff you can wish for if not much more. There are 6 different individual homescreens that you can set up on the phone. The homescreens are infinitely scrollable, and each homescreen is completely independent of each other allowing you to customize their unique aspects individually. You can set individual homescreen wallpapers and widgets easily. A bunch of excellent widgets are already available on the phone including the popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter etc. The messaging center can also be dragged and drop in the homescreen as a widget itself.

There is a homescreen widgets manager which lets you drag and drop widgets from one homescreen to the other, additionally lets you activate and deactivate existing widgets  as well as add new ones. The FP1 Belle also includes a nice iOS like “notification center” style activities manager which lists and updates you of all new notifications central. You can call the activities manager pull out menu by dragging from the top of the screen.

Additionally, like the popular SBSettings hack of iOS, Nokia has implemented the extremely useful toggles on the pull down menu to let you easily turn off/on important phone functions from any screen within the phone. You can easily switch off or turn on your WIFI, 3G, change the brightness etc straight from the pull down menu with the click of  a button.

Check out the screenshots above in the slider to have a look about what I am talking about. This is a welcoming change and reduces the overall clutter on the display screen significantly. It makes life easier!

Also, as default on any Symbian Belle smartphones, there are 3 virtual buttons on the bottom bar to make calls, launch the phone dialer etc. It is completely customizable. Other standard features including the media or gallery manager haven’t changed much, rather you will notice compared to the older versions there is a lack of features incorporated into it. The music player is enhanced by the Dolby Digital Plus surrounding which results in awesome music playback on the 808 PureView. The video player includes zero settings which may be a big drawback to some of us.

Another powerful aspect of the phone is its newly improved HTML5 web browser which renders web pages beautifully and without any fuss. The browser rendering is very fast and will load pages with HTML5 support fast (like ours!). The navigation pane automatically hides itself once you start to scroll down a page giving you the most of browsing screen space. It also supports Flash Lite.

The Camera:

Undoubtedly the biggest feature of the Nokia N808 PureView Smartphone is the camera it comes with. The sensor can take pictures with a maximum resolution of 41MP, however the maximum resolution for single static photos is 38MP in 4:3 mode and 34MP in 16:9 mode. There are 3 modes that is built in with the camera – the Automatic mode for simple point and shoot photography, the Scenes mode which is ideal for individuals who knows the basic of digital photography and the creative mode is purely for photographers who is sure about every aspect of digital photography. The creative mode allows you to control every single aspect of the camera details. The camera is equipped with a powerful XENON flash and comes with a neutral density filter.

The Xenon flash produces awesome results in low light conditions and mix it with the scenes mode properly will end up producing some of the most incredible low light photography ever achievable.

In automatic mode your images are filtered using the PureView sampling technology which also applies during photo-shoots using the loss less digital zoom. I am guessing most of us will be using this mode and shooting images via this mode rocks. You cannot alter the 5MP images in this mode but it does allow you to control the digital zooming of the photos.

The scenes mode works well when taking landscape images or shooting photography with a particular element in focus. Shooting outside in the winter with snow all around will work out perfectly in this mode. Like automatic mode, you will not be able to control the 5MP image resolution.

The creative mode allows you to control every aspect of a image before it is taken and this mode  truly includes a whole bunch of options you can play with. Beside the lossless digital zoom, there is a Slide Zoom which works out wonderfully as well. In slide zoom you can control the zoom focus by sliding down your finger from the point of your desired zoom without losing the touch focus of your photograph. This mode also allows you to control the quality of your images like Superfine JPEG, Normal JPEG etc. and allows you to play with the clarity and noise level of your images. Adjusting the exposure, sharpness, contrast ratio etc is quite easy if you have the basic understanding about how this combos play out.

All in all the camera is a proven star and is said to be better than Olympus E450 which is a huge thing in itself. If you take a photo on its 8MP setting you and compare it to any other phone with a 8MP camera you will see the vast difference of two photographs.

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N808 Creative Mode Sample

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Overall:

The Nokia N808 PureView comes with a 1.3GHZ processor which along with the light weight Symbian OS Belle FP1 produces beautiful smooth animations all over when navigating the menu. The web browsing experience is spectacular to say the least and Nokia’s new browser totally rocks. The power of its camera is the main attraction of the phone and there is simply no other phone on the market that can match or stand up to its monster lens. PureView 808 produces vibrant yet neutral color density for any images you take with it. The camera app itself is beautifully designed and well implemented to let anyone, newbies and pros to have a great time using it.

The battery lasts up to 34 hours doing regular stuff on average, like browsing and listening music which allows you to have ample amount of time using it restlessly. The phone, though seems bulky, actually fits your hands perfectly and doesn’t seem too much of a weight to carry around. Priced presently at around somewhere between RS 29,000 – RS 33000 in India, £499.98 in the UK, 490 Euros in the Europe the Nokia 808 is an awesome smartphone all over. The only drawback is that it is carrying the Belle Symbian OS which might be a turn off for some people, but, it still rocks!

About the Author

Chaos Inc.

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Hi, I am Ishtiaq and I'm the blogger of Nokia Symbian Themes. I have been a mobile enthusiast all my life so any questions you have regarding your mobile - I'm the person to ask.

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