Nokia 808 PureView available for UK pre-order

Jeff Parsons | News | 26/06/2012 09:42am

Nokia has announced today that the Nokia 808 PureView smartphone is available to pre-order from Amazon UK and will start shipping at the end of June.

The 808 PureView is already well known to us in the tech circle and grabbed headlines back in February at MWC 2012 for its astonishing 41 megapixel camera. Unfortunately though the PureView runs on Symbian – the now-defunct operating system Nokia left behind in favour of Windows Phone 7. The PureView has been in development for five years and when it started out, Symbian was still very much alive.

Snap happy

So, quite rightly, the emphasis from Nokia is clearly on the amazing camera packed inside the 808 PureView. Since the early days of the N-Series range, Nokia has been putting excellent cameras into its handsets, and the PureView name comes from the imaging technology developed by the Finnish company.

“PureView has completely raised the bar on imaging performance for the whole smartphone industry – and Nokia is not stopping here,” said Jo Harlow, Head of Smart Devices at Nokia. “We’re going to carry on developing PureView for our future smartphones in ways that will again revolutionise the imaging experience.”

The handset itself features the aforementioned 41 megapixel sensor as well as Carl Zeiss lenses and new pixel oversampling technology. At standard resolutions (2/3, 5 and 8 megapixels) this means it can zoom without any loss of clarity and capture seven pixels of information, condensing them into one pixel for a super sharp image.

At high-resolution the Nokia 808 will let you capture an image then zoom, reframe, crop and resize afterwards, as well as save in compact file sizes for sharing via MMS, email or over a social network. There’s also the option to shoot full HD 1080p video with 4X lossless zoom and Nokia Rich Recording – a feature that records audio at CD-like levels of quality.

Amazon is currently listing the Nokia 808 at a cool £500 for a SIM-free pre-order. The handset is due for release on June 30th, so get your order in now and you could be snapping away by next week.