The charmingly chunky PureView 808 was the first to sport Nokia’s impressive new imaging technology, but it (thankfully) won’t be the last. In a brief video interview with HowardForums, Nokia US President Chris Weber noted that the company’s lauded PureView camera tech would eventually find a new home on Windows Phones.
“You can expect we’ll be bringing PureView technologies to the Windows Phone platform and future Lumia devices,” he said. “We’re absolutely committed to doing that.”
Nothing like a bit of double confirmation, right? Nokia VP Jo Harlow mentioned the same thing to a Finnish newspaper back in March, and now with a sneak peek of Windows Phone Apollo coming up, we could be seeing the fruits of their labor soon.
Exactly which PureView technologies will make the transition is left unclear though — Nokia generally lumps their 41-megapixel sensor, Carl Zeiss optics, and software under one “PureView technologies” banner, which implies that the entire package will eventually be implemented in a Windows Phone. It remains to be seen if Nokia will simply transplant all of that PureView tech into a forthcoming Windows Phone (the most likely scenario) or if they have some other plan waiting in the wings.
Smart man that he is, Weber didn’t provide so much as a hint as to when we could expect to see super-sized sensors in Windows Phones (or even if), but the very fact that they’re coming should be welcome news for Nokia fans. The company reported sales of roughly 2 million Lumia smartphones in Q1 2012, and while those numbers don’t include the recently-launched Lumia 900 or Lumia 610, it’s rather doubtful that Nokia’s smartphones have managed to give bigger players like Apple and Samsung runs for their money.
It should go without saying that a great camera does not a great smartphone make, but there’s little question that the mobile camera arms race is heating up. HTC’s One X has garnered much applause for its combination of sensor and ImageSense software for one, and other handset manufacturers are fighting for a way to differentiate their offerings from a sea of competitive hardware. Nokia potentially has a game changer with PureView, provided they can get those sensors implanted into devices other than the Symbian Belle-powered 808 soon.
For now though, all we can do is wait and drool over the sort of pictures Nokia’s next Windows Phone may be able to produce.