Remember the Nokia 808 PureView? Announced at MWC, the Symbian device has a 41MP camera that is more than a marketing gimmick. Now, with its launch coming up in the next couple of months, Nokia has released a promotional video on YouTube – shot entirely on the phone itself. We’ve already seen how phenomenal the shots can be, and we can’t wait to go hands-on. Watch the video below, and marvel at the camera over on the galleries at My Nokia Blog.
Have you ever dreamt of having x-ray vision? If so, new research from the University of Texas that could lead to x-ray cameras built into smartphones should be right up your street. The range of vision would be restricted to 4 inches for privacy reasons, and such cameras are years away from commercial availability, but these developments are exciting nevertheless.
While the smartphone of today has become a pretty amazing sensor for discovering the real world, the smartphone of tomorrow may just give you the ability to have X-ray vision. That’s the potential implication of a breakthrough at the University of Texas, Dallas, where researchers say they have taken a big step closer to enabling a phone to see a short distance through wood, walls, plastics and other objects.
It comes down to the ability to bridge what’s called the terahertz gap in the infrared band. The terahertz band is largely unused because the band is too high for electronics and too low for light-based systems. But an engineering team at the University of Texas at Dallas has found a way to create images with signals in the terahertz band without having to use multiple lenses inside a device. Basically, they’re able to focus light without using a lot of big lenses and…
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TechCrunch explains a bit about the Nokia 808 PureView and why its insane megapixel count is more than a gimmick.
Nokia shocked the tech world this morning with the announcement of the 808 PureView, the spiritual successor to the N8. While the actual phone itself had been rumoured for some time, the confirmation of a 41 megapixel sensor came as a surprise to everyone. While people may dismiss such a specification as pure marketing crap, Nokia’s new PureView technology can compress numerous pixels into one for ultra-clear images. The technology sounds phenomenal and has been in the works for 5 years, meaning that it launches with Symbian before a planned launch on other platforms. The phone is capable of shooting stills at up to 38MP, but optimal performance comes with compression to 5MP. 1080p video can be shot with 4x lossless zoom, and due to the massive sensor, zooming is actually more like using a different part of the sensor rather than trimming the shot down. The document explaining the tech makes for a great read, and has this sensor diagram to prove a point.
Aside from the 41MP camera, the phone is a standard Symbian Belle affair. A 1.3GHz single core chip powers things, while 16GB of internal storage can be boosted to 48GB via microSD for your photo collection. A 4″ nHD (640 x 360) ClearBlack AMOLED occupies the front face with buttons similar to the Lumia 710, and 2.5D Gorilla Glass coats the device. Having such a large sensor comes at a price, however. At its thinnest, it remains over half an inch and the camera protrudes to 17.95mm. Have a glance at the full spec sheet and some phenomenal sample shots here.
The device is set to ship worldwide in May as the Symbian swansong at €450 before tax, but expect to see the technology making its way into other Nokia products before the year is out if Symbian doesn’t float your boat.
First things first, this review will be from the point of view of a Microsoft enthusiast and will largely include my opinions and hatred of Android that all writers on this website share.
I’ve had a Windows Phone for around a year now and I love it. Last year for Christmas I received my HTC HD7 and it was the best thing I’d ever been given. The UI amazed me, the fact that it had Microsoft Office was so cool that I could hardly put it into words. I even wrote this epic review on the 4.3 inch The best bit of all was that it connected to my Xbox Live account and my games got me achievements. However after about a week usage I began to notice a few major flaws in the first version of WP7.
However it was announced within a month or two that NoDo, the first big update to be announced for my new phone, was to be released in March and that Angry Birds (the main reason that I had wanted a smartphone) was to finally be on Xbox Live. I was very excited as all of the things that made WP7 inferior to Android and iOS were going to be fixed. In reality all we received was copy and paste. And Angry Birds was not released for another four or five months.
After this series of let downs when Mango was announced I was not expecting great things but I looked on the WP7 website and liked what I saw. Groups seemed like a good idea. And the social network integration looked like something that I would use. On the October 15th I finally downloaded Mango. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done. Read on past the break to find out why.
Digixav 