Nokia 808 PureView Review

What's the difference between innovation and an upgrade? Real innovation is when you do something nobody has done before you, that was deemed impossible or not worth pursuing. In the Nokia 808 PureView, which has been conceived and tweaked in Nokia's R&D labs for the last five years we have these markings of true innovation,.

Granted, the handset is a chunky little thing, and it is running Symbian, but it's the potential for major disruption in the smartphone camera department that its PureView photographic technology holds that matters here.

Shutterbugs will tell you that you can live with less apps, and slick design gets old quick when you use a handset daily, but if you have the typical smartphone camera module inside, you are stuck for the duration of your ownership with mediocre pics, in a time where your phone is your most used camera.

Hopefully the technology in the 41MP sensor of the Nokia 808 PureView will be leveraged into a versatile line of products to mark the next era in smartphone photography, but for now let's look at this enthusiast device as a whole in our review, with a special emphasis on its stellar camera abilities...

Design:

There is no arguing that it is function before form with the design of the Nokia 808 PureView. The Finns just built a phone around the monstrous 41MP PureView sensor, instead of the other way around.


The soap-shaped front with the plain plastic bar that houses the call, end and home key/notification light below the display make the device look like a typical affordable Symbian handset. That feeling is reinforced by the significant thickness and the plain, but sturdy plastic chassis. We got the black version, which is the most unassuming of all other colors like white and red the phone is available in.


Flip the handset over, however, and it starts telling a different story. You just can't miss the huge elliptic metal plate that takes a quarter of the back, and covers the 41MP sensor, as well as the rare combination between a Xenon flash for still shots, and LED light for focus assist and video illumination.

Still, when considering that the sensor is 1/1.2” - the largest in a cameraphone – and its advanced optics, Nokia has managed to keep the phone size and especially the weight in check. Moreover, the 14mm thickness and the “hump” that the sensor produces on the back, make for a comfortable grip in your palm. All in all, the handset is borderline ugly, but with a sturdy build, and unless you are overly self-conscious, it won't ruin your street cred when you take it out.


All side buttons – the volume rocker, lock slider and the two-stage shutter key on the right - are made of metal and very easy to feel and press. The ports like microUSB, HDMI and audio jack are all concentrated at the top, and the rest is plain, giving the phone somewhat barren looks from the side.


Display:

We have a 4” AMOLED screen on the Nokia 808 PureView, with the typical for Symbian 360x640 pixels of resolution, which is pretty low for today's standards, and makes for below average 184ppi pixel density. Thus if you look into solid colors, icon edges or enlarge text they look pixelated, and 480x800 would be the minimum for a 4-incher to look decent in that respect.

Furthermore, the AMOLED display is behaving like one, exhibiting saturated to the point of gaudy, but cold colors, making white backgrounds in websites appear blueish compared to a good LCD.

Yet its other virtues like great contrast ratio and viewing angles more than compensate, and the addition of Nokia's ClearBlack layer improves sunlight visibility a lot by bringing screen reflection down to a minimum. You won't have any troubles working the interface or framing your shots even when the sun is shining directly on the display, and this is pretty important for a cameraphone like the 808 PureView.

Interface and Functionality:

The initial Symbian Belle release introduced multiple homescreens, resizable widgets and pull-down notification bar, as well as significantly cleaned up the code which sped up performance. Symbian Belle Feature Pack 1 that's running on the 808 PureView Nokia brings other enhancements like a ton of new widgets, including a useful data counter.


Moreover, it improves on Symbian's multitasking menu – long press the home key, and life-size previews of the last state you left the running apps in appear, making it a snap to recognize and chose where you want to return to. Symbian and Android are the only ones with true multitasking, until memory runs out, so this was a good area to focus on.


While Symbian Belle FP1 now has the looks of more advanced mobile operating systems, and runs fairly well on the 1.3GHz processor, it doesn't have the feel. There is a number of unnecessary warnings popping up when you use features for the first time, even simple stuff like connecting to a Wi-Fi network, or unneeded warnings about certificates and stuff no standard user ever wants to see. These stop showing when you log in with a Nokia account, though.

Furthermore, commands take way longer than on iOS, WP or Android – the loading circle appears often, plus app installations or updates might take many minutes and/or require more input from the user. 1GB of RAM would have been much better, but we have half of that here.

Granted, Ovi Store has 50, 000+ apps, which is not little at all, and covers a lot of ground, but most of them are with clunky interfaces, and/or way more expensive than what you'd find at the App or Play Stores, not to mention the nHD screen resolution they are made for. For social networking, for instance, you have to rely on the Nokia Social widget, which doesn't refresh automatically, and there are no notifications. If you want something better, you'd have to hit the Ovi Store.


The partnership with Microsoft trickled down to Symbian handsets as well, and a pretty polished versions of Office Mobile with OneNote runs native now, plus Microsoft's enterprise IM app Lync is present as well, complete with SharePoint logins and all. There's no tethering from the OS itself, but the best app for the task JoikuSpot is preinstalled. Another useful license comes with F-secure Mobile Security.

Overall, in terms of functionality Symbian Belle FP1 on the Nokia 808 PureView can rank along the modern Android, iOS, or Windows Phone, and sometimes excels in things like a full landscape layout and easy file transfer. When it comes to fluidity and user experience, though, it is much less uniform, requires a steeper learning curve, and its outdated resolution and processor support stand little chance against the contemporary mobile OS players.

Internet and Connectivity:

The Symbian Belle FP1 browser renders pages pretty badly, with the checkered boxes appearing almost every time you pinch to zoom in. Scrolling and panning around are also choppy compared to the competition, unless the page has loaded completely, not to mention the 360x640 screen res on a 4” screen, which is prohibitive for spending a lot of time in the browser. It supports Flash Lite 4.0, so ads and some Flash video websites will run, but games and eye candy design that needs full Adobe Flash support are a no-show.


The Nokia 808 PureView has a pentaband radio with up to 14.4 Mbps HSDPA downloads, so it should work with any micro-SIM you put in it. The handset has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and A-GPS, which is taken a good use of with the free offline voice-guided navigation of Nokia Drive in most countries worldwide.

There is DLNA streaming, managed by the DLNA Play app, and NFC chip in the battery cover, which allows you to exchange content with other Nokia phones and accessories, play games with them and so on.

The microHDMI port at the top allows you to hook the phone easily to a TV and use the Big Screen app to manage your mirrored content. An FM Radio rounds it up, and the phone can serve as an FM transmitter to stream tunes to your car stereo with the Play via Radio app.

Camera:

It’s easy to understand our excitement about the camera performance of the Nokia 808 PureView, so we will be making this part of the review much longer than usual, with subsections that highlight the different abilities of the best-in-class PureView camera.          


Technology:

The 41-megapixel sensor is still with 1.4 micron pixels, as on most smartphones and compact cams, but its size is the whopping 1/1.2”, which is 2.5 times bigger than the 1/1.83” one in the previous smartphone record holder - Nokia N8. It’s also much larger than the average sensor used in most compact standalone cameras, thus able to capture more photons on its surface, which makes for excellent low light performance.

Also, the handset has a dedicated ISP attached to the sensor, which is keeping the staggering amount of pixels and frames manageable for the processor. In fact, Nokia said it had to wait until mobile processors reached their current strength, so they are able to cope with the PureView sensor workload. The presence of an in-house ISP explains how we get fluid 1080p video with only a single-core CPU, for example.

PureView:

Nokia chose to do a gigantic 41MP camera sensor, because it would allow it to not only achieve lossless zoom, but also something called “pixel oversampling” in the PureView camera technology white paper.

Oversampling combines the myriad of neighboring pixels that the gigantic sensor produces, and makes one “super pixel” out of several – seven when in Automatic mode. These pixels are binned together into what Nokia claims is the perfect one, using its proprietary algorithm to keep the highest amount of detail and average out the noise that all of the pixels carry.

That is why the automatic mode, for example, shoots in 5MP, keeping speed and file size in check, but using the staggering amount of info from the 41MP sensor to create a picture Nokia says is times better than your average smartphone or compact camera, because of the pixel oversampling. Naturally, the more you zoom in or the higher the resolution you shoot in, the more of the oversampling effect is lost, that is why Nokia recommends to stick to the Automatic or the 8MP PureView modes.

Zoom:

Nokia didn’t stop here, however - it has long wished to put real zoom in its phones. There were prototypes with optical zoom, but the added bulk and the noise that these solutions produced while zooming into the footage meant a no-go. The big breakthrough came once a Nokia engineer thought about the way satellite imagery is done, and the lab decided to use resolution unheard of for a smartphone, in order to achieve lossless zoom without moving optics, and the associated distortion and aberrations.

In PureView mode you can do up to 3x lossless zoom for stills, while in video mode you can go up to 12x, depending on the video definition. When you shoot in full resolution with the 38 or 34 (16:9) effective megapixels you can’t zoom, of course.

Naturally, the more you zoom in, the more of the pixel oversampling effect is lost, and the table above shows the oversampling ratio at each level of zoom and resolution. Still, the quality lost while zooming in is much less than with that useless interpolation digital zooming brings on other smartphones. Think of it as instead of blowing up a small crappy photo (digital zoom), you just cut a piece of a bigger, quality poster to get the same scene in the Nokia 808 PureView.



Interface:

Shooting modes - Automatic:

Just like the phone's design, the camera interface also puts function before form, and is pretty Spartan-looking, with only some transparency used for a good measure. There are three modes - Automatic, Scenes and Creative.

The automatic mode is for quick snaps, allowing you to adjust only the flash status. Nokia’s Damian Dinning, its camera guru, explained that they took a bit different approach in automatic mode this time, compared to the Nokia N8. The main goal with the N8 was to achieve more natural looking scene, that profi photographers are so fond of, leading to less appealing for the average user photos at first look, since most cameras strive for jolly, oversaturated colors and higher contrast than what’s in reality, because that’s what consumers like.

This has been repaired in the Nokia 808 PureView 5MP automatic mode, which Damian says produces slightly more appealing colors and contrast than the more professional Creative mode, where the phone switches to strictly natural color reproduction, unless you manually adjust the settings.



Shooting modes - Scenes:

Scenes has a fair amount of preset settings that Nokia deems perfect for different situations that may arise, like Portrait, Night Portrait, Night, Macro, Landscape, Snow, Sports, Spotlight and so on. You get the same 5MP 16:9 shots as in Automatic mode.

Portrait and Night Portrait emphasize on flesh color, for example, focusing on the faces in your subject group, while Snow ups the exposure a bit, so reflective environment like snow, beach sand or ice doesn't get darker than it is, which often happens with high ambient reflectance. Spotlight would be perfect for a concert or a theatre play, where the light shines directly on the performer, and so on. You get to preview how the scene looks like under the various Scenes in the viewfinder.

Scenes takes you one step further than the fully automatic mode, sort of a station on the way to the fully manual, or the so-called Creative mode, yet frankly the Automatic mode is sufficiently intelligent when it comes to choosing settings on the fly depending on the situation.



Shooting modes – Creative:

Here you can unleash the full potential of the 41MP PureView camera, and manually set it at full 38MP resolution in 4:3, or 34MP in 16:9 ratios. Alternatively, you can use the PureView mode in 3, 5 and 8MP with 4:3, and 2, 5 and 8MP with 16:9 aspect ratios, while setting the JPEG quality output as Normal or Superfine.


A very handy feature of the Creative regime are the three custom mode buttons C1, C2 and C3 – they remember the last combination of settings you've made, so you can quickly set up three macros that suit your photographic needs for the moment, and are very easy to get to quickly.

Here you can set different levels for saturation, contrast and sharpness with the provided sliders. The next details you can tinker with are the color tones - Normal, Vivid, Sepia and B&W. The Vivid mode is roughly what you get from most consumer cameras and smartphones, with higher than normal saturation and contrast, which makes for extremely eye-pleasing results, yet nothing gaudy as so often is the case.


The last variable while in Creative mode is Capture - there is the usual Self-timer at 2, 10 and 30 seconds, then comes Interval capture. Interval shooting allows you to fix the phone somewhere, and tell it to shoot 2-1500 pictures in 5 seconds to 30 minutes intervals – perfect for time-lapse photography.

The other capture regime is Bracketing - you can take 3 or 5 images with a preset range of exposure adjustments, such as -0.3/+0.3, -0.7/+0.7, -1/+1, and -2/+2 steps. Sadly, you have to combine them yourself, or use an app, as there is no HDR mode out of the box. Of notable absence is a Panorama mode in the camera interface, too, something that comes by default now with Android 4.0, for example, but you can turn to Ovi Store for help.


Last, but not least, you are still left with many variables accessible via five shortcuts on the left side of the viewfinder in Creative mode. These are the flash mode, exposure adjustment (which brings up a handy histogram to help you choose the correct setting), white balance (cloudy, sunny, incandescent, fluorescent and automatic), ISO (50-1600), and the ND filter (on/off and automatic).

We also have a Neutral Density (ND) filter built-in, which is one of the few moving parts in the camera body, and sometimes kicks in to prevent overexposure in bright light scenarios. The good thing is that it can also be turned on and off manually to achieve effects like motion blur during longer exposure/slow shutter times, making for beautiful waterfall or wave shots, for example.

A feature worth mentioning here is the sleep-to-snap mode, which allows you to press the dedicated shutter key while the phone is locked, go into the camera app, and immediately take a photo, all for about a second or two, like on the Sony Xperia NXT phones. Focusing and taking a shot are almost instant, save for the Full Resolution mode, which takes a second or two, depending on the lighting conditions.

Finally, for continuous shooting you simply hold the physical shutter key, and the phone takes one snap after another every second or so until you release it. Still, the speed of capture here is much less compared to the zero shutter lag Android flagships this season, which can take multiple photos per second, so it can hardly be called burst mode.

Image quality:

And after the lengthy interface review, we come to the juiciest part – the picture quality. Nokia recommends shooting in the Automatic mode, which gets you 5MP photos with 16:9 aspect ratio. The Automatic mode is the perfect one for the casual photographer, since the resulting pics are less than 1MB, compared to the 2-3MB in 8MP, or 10-12MB at full resolution. These 5MP ones are easy to post on Facebook, Flickr, or shoot with an email, and the phone provides these sharing options. Yet you can still get high quality prints up to 10.2/5.7” (26/14.6cm) from them, if that’s your thing.

Still, we know you are itching to see the big resolutions as well, so after taking the shot in automatic mode, we took it in 8MP PureView and one with the full 38MP resolution. For added perspective, we covered some of the shots with a Panasonic DMC-GF2 in fully automatic mode as well – a good 12MP consumer camera on which we had 14-40mm lens kit.  


Outdoor shots:

Photos are simply great, and no other phone comes even close to what the Nokia 808 PureView is able to photograph. From the stunning amount of detail, through the excellent color reproduction, to the spot-on exposure and white balance even in mean lighting conditions, the sharp and clean shots below speak for themselves. We’d recommend shooting Automatic or turning on the Vivid mode, if you think colors are too natural for your taste, then you’d have the perfect vacation shot without any need for post-processing. Speaking of which, shots with the full resolution are simply a treasure trove for plugging into Photoshop, and making wonders out of all the photographic info hidden in them.


The only time there are issues with the Nokia 808 PureView is in Close-up mode, or when you try to focus on a nearby object. Nokia says focus is from 15cm to Infinity, but you’ll have issues focusing on anything closer than 20-25cm, and in excellent lighting at that, as with that great macro shot we did by the seaside. On the other hand, with the lossless zoom you can always focus from further away, and zoom in on the subject with similar effect, yet it won't be as good as the macro that the iPhone 4S or the Galaxy S III produce.



Indoor and low-light shots:

With the Nokia 808 PureView we finally have a phone that produces excellent results in low light. The sensor is so big, that more than enough photons get in even as light gets dimmer, and only at full-res photos in low light one can start noticing the noise. Moreover it is the preferable luminance noise, rather than the splotches produced by most smartphones and compacts. That solution is in line with Nokia’s strategy to let some noise in to avoid doing any software noise reduction and smear even a modicum of detail, which experts agree is the correct path to take. Indoor and low-light pictures are a great achievement indeed. We get clean, well-defined shots even when the light goes all the way down. The Xenon flash is twice more powerful than the one in the Nokia N8 even, and provides great illumination up to 12 feet.


With night shots, sometimes the phone chooses too slow of a shutter speed, so in your typical “holding with two hands and bated breath” scenario, the shots get less clear than they should be, as you can see in the night shots of the cathedral, compared to the bulkier, but steady Panasonic. As a rule of thumb you can manually up the ISO a notch in Creative mode to get the best results for night shots - maybe a little noisier, but sharper - since otherwise the phone will most likely choose a slower shutter speed, and there is no way to set that manually.



Video:

Video is shot in 1080p Full HD in Automatic mode, with consistent 30fps and sports continuous autofocus, which can be toggled on and off even while filming. Clips are recorded in the popular MPEG-4 format with 20Mbps.


Video capture has Scenes mode too, with Low Light, Spotlight, Sports and Snow settings – that last one should be used at the beach as well, or anywhere there is a lot of ambient reflectance.


The Creative mode from the pics is present for shooting video, and allows for 1080p, 720p and 360p definition settings, with 15, 24, 25 or 30fps. In the default 1080p mode you have four times lossless zoom, which becomes 6x if shooting at 720p, and the whopping 12x lossless zoom at the screen’s nHD 640x360 resolution.


Another setting is the color tone – we get the default Normal, and also Vivid, Sepia and B&W. Saturation, sharpness and contrast levels can be adjusted with individual sliders before video capture in Creative mode as well. There is digital video stabilization in Preferences that is off by default.

Video quality:

The automatic mode shoots excellent, fluid videos as you can see below, with an incredible amount of detail, zippy exposure adjustment while panning around, and very natural color reproduction. Yet, we would get into creative mode and bump the color saturation a notch to get the perfect imagery.

The only trouble we saw was with the overzealous continuous autofocus (CAF) which constantly adjusts something while panning around, and is on by default in all modes. Yet when you bring something closer than 20-25cm the phone can’t hook onto it, but keeps focusing on the background, instead of the nearby object front and center. This is easily overcome with the Touch Focus feature, which turns off CAF the second you tap on the screen, and focuses on the object of your choosing. The downside is that you have to tap again to switch focus to the background, or turn on CAF on the fly.









Nokia Rich Recording is the new name of the 128kbps stereo sound with 48kHz sampling while capturing video, which is touted to be with CD quality, very clean thanks to the noise-canceling mics, and with a strong volume. Nokia says the microphones are able to capture clean more frequencies than any other mobile solution available. It can also capture very loud sounds - the astonishing 140dB - meaning that you will still be able to record crisp sound without distortions on your next night out clubbing or at a concert. In fact, it’s the best stereo audio we’ve ever recorded with a smartphone, but don’t take our word for it, just listen to the samples.





Multimedia:

Symbian’s music player is pretty good looking and versatile with its Cover Flow-like album art, song categorization, a few equalizer presets, and in this phone with Dolby Mobile surround sound in headset mode.


The tune progress bar and the controls are large enough to allow easy finger operation, yet not overly so to look ugly. The loudspeaker is pretty great, very strong and with a clear output, carrying over that commendable tradition from the Nokia N8.

The video player, while with the most basic interface imaginable, runs everything, including DivX/Xvid and MKV files out of the box, and up to 1080p definition. It’s another story whether Full HD is needed on this 360x640 screen. At least the AMOLED technology with its flashy colors makes video more enjoyable to watch.

Just like the Nokia N8, there is a pretty capable photo editor on the phone, allowing you to do basic and not so basic alterations to your pictures. You can crop, resize, stitch, post-process colors, contrast and so on, as well as add frames, text, clipart, and multiple color effects.

Call quality and battery life:

The Nokia 808 PureView provides adequate volume in the earpiece during conversation, with no audible distortions, hissing or echo. The dual mics also do a decent job relaying our voice to the other side clean enough, and weeding out the background noise while talking. Here we have to mention again the excellent loudspeaker, which makes it unlikely that you’ll miss a call.

Nokia quotes the 1400mAh battery for about 7 hours of talk time in 3G mode which is pretty average. Symbian, despite its true multitasking is a pretty frugal mobile OS, and Nokia uses a black background everywhere in the interface, so the AMOLED screen draws less juice.

The huge 41MP camera doesn’t seem to draw an excessive amount of energy while filming and processing shots, too, and we were able to do many shots after the low battery warning without the phone dying on us. Nokia says that moving parts in the camera module are reduced to the minimum, so overall the Nokia 808 PureView could last you a weekend with normal use, as most Symbian phones do, unless you are browsing for a long time, which you probably won't do to yourself considering the abilities of the default browser.

Conclusion:

We admit that we paid the bulk of our attention in the review to the camera on the Nokia 808 PureView, because we were mesmerized by what the 41MP module is capable of. As a phone the handset functions as good as it gets with Symbian, especially if you have some experience with this mobile OS, then your basics will be covered, otherwise the learning curve might be steep. To somewhat compensate for the comparatively clunky interface and apps, the 808 PureView carries the free offline navigation of Nokia Drive in most countries worldwide.

Frankly, we are in awe of what Nokia has produced with the camera in this phone. The achievement makes us optimistic about its future flagships, despite the major turnaround that is going on at the company now. Even in today’s breakneck smartphone industry, it’s been a long time since we saw true innovation - something that is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, with no chance of being replicated in a few months by everybody, as was the case with dual-core processors or HD screens - the main hardware innovations in the last two years.

Granted, at the initial price Nokia is asking for the 808 PureView you can get any flagship out there, be it the Galaxy S III, iPhone 4S, Optimus 4X HD or the HTC One X. They are all svelte, with high-res displays, decent cameras, speedy processors and hundreds of thousands of quality apps behind their backs, but get quickly overshadowed as soon as the next best thing is around the corner with upgraded specs, design, and a clever software trick or two.

Enthusiasts that will purchase the 808 PureView, however, know that they can live without many less important things, but if they want the best photography a mobile device can deliver, that’s precisely what Nokia’s groundbreaking invention offers.

Here's to hoping that the example Nokia sets with the PureView smartphone camera technology will up the ante for the other manufacturers to push even harder in delivering better shooters in their future handsets, and that might easily be the best thing that the existence of the Nokia 808 PureView achieves. And here’s to hoping Nokia will popularize this amazing camera technology further by bringing it to a flagship Windows Phone 8 device, that might very well start a new smartphone era. For now, the Nokia 808 PureView is in a league of its own.

Software version: 112.020.0309

Nokia 808 PureView Video Review: