Nokia 808 PureView first sample shots — feast your eyes
feast your eyes — This is it. Here's an exclusive first look at some sample shots taken with Nokia's freshly minted 808 PureView imaging powerhouse — and wow, just wow! The collection contains photos taken at different resolutions in various conditions …
Context & Ripple Effects
These sample shots land at a fragile moment for Nokia: the company shed $19 billion in market value during 2011, and its first Microsoft-powered Lumias only went on sale in January 2012 amid unconfirmed talk of modest volumes. The 41-megapixel 808, announced this week running Symbian Belle, arrives as a flagship built on the old platform rather than the new one.
That tension explains why the story travelled so widely on day one — eight outlets picked it up, including an inside account of five years of camera development at AllThingsD alongside hands-ons at Engadget and TechCrunch. With Nokia holding nearly half of the second-generation Windows Phone OEM market, the optics matter: PureView is being positioned as proof Nokia still leads in hardware even as its software base transitions.
First-order effects
- The sample images put immediate competitive pressure on Samsung, Apple and HTC, whose current flagships now face a camera benchmark measured against a 41-megapixel sensor rather than incremental megapixel gains.
- For Nokia, the gallery is a marketing asset deployed while investors question the company's direction — a concrete demonstration of engineering strength at the exact moment its Lumia launch momentum is still unverified.
Second-order effects
- If the imaging halo drives demand, expect calls — already implicit in the Symbian-versus-Windows Phone split — to bring PureView technology into the Windows Phone Lumia lineup, forcing Nokia to solve the integration question its own portfolio raises.
- Rivals' camera roadmaps get re-benchmarked: any handset launching through 2012 without a credible answer to these samples risks ceding the photography claim that has anchored premium-tier marketing.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward camera sensors becoming the primary differentiator in an otherwise commoditizing smartphone market, with pixel counts and optics — rather than app ecosystems alone — as the basis for premium pricing.
- If oversampled large-sensor designs prove out commercially, handset makers shift investment toward sensor partnerships and computational imaging pipelines, a structural change in how phones are specified and sourced.
The trend: Smartphone competition is pivoting toward camera hardware as the decisive premium differentiator, and Nokia's 41-megapixel 808 PureView is the data point resetting that bar.