Nokia 808 PureView (Unlocked)

The Nokia 808 PureView ($699 list) is an engineering exercise and a collector's item. It's also a near-total failure as a modern smartphone. It packs an amazing 41-megapixel camera sensor, but thanks to an exceedingly long development time, the 808 PureView runs the archaic Symbian OS instead of Windows Phone like all current Nokia devices. Worse, some of the preloaded apps don't even work correctly. Nokia hasn't given an exact date for the 808 PureView's arrival in the U.S., and if you're wondering why you'd want this cell phone, you don't. It's way too expensive and is compromised for American consumers.

Design and Display
The 808 PureView—not to be confused with the Kanye West album, 808s & Heartbreak, or the 808 kick drum you hear on Beastie Boys and Run D.M.C. records—is an odd beast. It's slightly bulky and misshapen, measuring 4.9 by 2.4 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighing a hefty six ounces. It's not actually 0.6 inch thick all the way through, though, as there's a very prominent bump around the camera lens. The PureView 808 is closer to half an inch thick otherwise, which is still more than most in this era of super-thin smartphones. But there's a 41-megapixel camera in there, so we'll give it a break.
As always, Nokia has a fine touch with hardware design. The 808 PureView feels very well made, with quality plastics, a Corning Gorilla Glass front panel, and button housings that seem laser-cut in their precision. The phone turns on and off almost instantly with the little Power button on the bottom right of the front panel. A slider switch handles unlocking the screen faster than any other phone I've tested recently. You get a top-mounted micro HDMI port and a dedicated Camera button as well. Nokia also packs in a microUSB charger, a data cable, a wired stereo headset, and a wrist strap in the box.

Gorilla glass aside, the 4-inch, 640-by-360-pixel capacitive AMOLED touch screen is old news. Fonts look pixelated, and you can't see much of desktop Web pages, but at least it's bright and colorful, with deep blacks. Touch response is uneven; during testing the phone lagged finger swipes by about half a second, which made navigation tricky. There's an accelerometer, but it constantly jumped around even when we were holding the handset perfectly level in landscape mode. Typing was incredibly frustrating as a result, although the keys are roomy enough. In portrait mode it was much tougher to type accurately. It seems like a software issue; there's no problem typing quickly on the iPhone and numerous Android phones with 3.5-inch screens in portrait mode; 4 inches should be plenty.

Connectivity and Voice Calls
The PureView 808 is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and five-band HSPA+ 14.4 (850/900/1700/1900/2100 MHz) device with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. We had no problem connecting to a WPA2-encrypted network in our testing lab. The 808 is a true world phone, and one that can run at 14.4 speeds on both AT&T and T-Mobile here in the U.S., as well as overseas. Unfortunately, there's no 4G support of any kind, which is a tough con to swallow at $700. Since it's unlocked, you'll need to provide your own SIM card. This is the major reason why the PureView 808 costs so much, though many unlocked, high-end Android smartphones with dual-core processors and much better screens cost $500 or less.

Voice calls sounded good when they worked. Unfortunately, that wasn't often. Even with five solid AT&T signal bars in the middle of Manhattan, most dial attempts ended in "Connection Error" dialogs. Then, mysteriously, a third or fourth try would go through, and the call would stay connected. Voice quality in the earpiece sounded fine, and mostly midrange, but with plenty of gain. Transmissions through the microphone were exceptionally full and clear, almost like a corded phone. Noise cancellation is also good; we heard very little street noise through the earpiece in a voicemail test, and there was certainly plenty going on at the time.

Calls through a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars) sounded clear. Voice dialing over Bluetooth was hopeless, though; we couldn't get the 808 PureView to recognize any of our commands. The speakerphone sounded well balanced, but too low for use outdoors even at maximum volume. Battery life was poor; we got just 4 hours and 20 minutes of talk time in 3G mode, which is several hours off the pace of nearly all current smartphones.

OS, Apps, and Multimedia
Underneath the hood, there's a 1.3GHz ARM 11 single-core processor, 512MB RAM, and 16GB of onboard storage that you can expand to 48GB by installing up to a 32GB microSD card underneath the battery. My 32GB SanDisk card worked fine, although pulling the battery to swap cards is never fun.

Unfortunately, the phone runs Symbian, which dates back an entire decade. Nokia has abandoned the OS in favor of Windows Phone. The 808 PureView has Symbian because the company has been developing the phone for several years, and had started well before deciding to throw in with Microsoft. All things considered, Nokia has done a decent job of modernizing Symbian. At least superficially, it looks like an Android phone, with four customizable home screens you can swipe between. You tap icons to run programs, and you can install third-party apps, although there aren't that many, at least for us here in the U.S.

Alas, there is some good stuff in here: Quickoffice lets you open and edit Word and Excel files; Shazam hears music playing in the room and identifies it for you; Angry Birds and Asphalt 6 demos are colorful and play smoothly. Interestingly, the 808 PureView includes Nokia Rich Recording, which lets the phone record audio at up to 140dB, which is roughly the volume of a jet engine while you're standing 10 feet away from it. That's great for, say, recording concerts, but please don't try the jet engine thing at home.

Otherwise, it's just too difficult to get just about anything done unless you're already intimately familiar with Symbian—and very patient. Menus beget submenus, which beget dialog boxes, which beget error messages. The browser is a disaster; aside from the blocky, tiny fonts and stubborn screen response, the browser gets hung up on commonly used elements and can take a minute or more to deliver an HTML page.

Worse, many things don't even work at all. Nokia Music goes to a defunct Ovi Store, which then puts up a screen telling you a new store is on the way. The IM client is impossible to configure, as it asks for a CWA Server URL and a Network Connection type, and not, say, whether you use AIM or Google Talk. Nokia Recommends suggests a few random music albums, but then directs you to Nokia Music, which is down. Nokia Drive actually starts Nokia Maps, which does work and delivers voice-enabled, turn-by-turn GPS navigation, although it looks dated.

There's a standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack on top that works with the bundled wired earbuds as well as any aftermarket headphones you may want to use. Music tracks sounded clear and punchy through Plantronics BackBeat Go Bluetooth headphones ($99.99, 4 stars). The music player displays albums in a jukebox-style format you can swipe back and forth. For video, the 808 PureView had no problem playing back all of our test files, including DivX, Xvid, MP4, H.264, AVI, and WMV at resolutions up to 1080p, though obviously the low-resolution screen is a limiting factor in terms of sharpness.
PureView Camera Performance
Nonetheless, if you're considering purchasing the Nokia 808, it probably isn't for its Symbian OS, 3G data connection, or low-resolution display. The reason the phone has gotten any buzz at all is because of its PureView camera system, a 41-megapixel image sensor married to a Carl Zeiss f/2.4 prime lens. We'll admit that we were skeptical when the phone was announced—packing millions upon millions pixels onto a small image sensor is generally the work of marketing departments and does more to hurt image quality than anything else.

But the PureView system takes a slightly different approach to imaging. The physical sensor size, which has more influence over image quality than resolution, is 1/1.2 inches. That's bigger than is found in a top-end compact point-and-shoot camera like the Olympus XZ-1 ($499.99, 3.5 stars), and only slightly smaller than the 1-inch sensor found in the Nikon J1 ($649.95, 3.5 stars).

Rather than simply using all of the pixels, the camera saves images at much more manageable 3MP, 5MP, or 8MP resolutions. If you're shooting at the widest angle—equivalent to a 28mm lens in classic 35mm photography—the camera processes the image to minimize noise and saves it at a lower resolution. You can also apply an in-camera digital zoom, which varies in power based on the output resolution. The image is then cropped, and the camera applies the same sampling algorithm to the pixels that encompass your frame. This may sound like voodoo, but our lab tests showed that it does work as advertised in reducing noise at higher ISO settings.

We put the N808's camera through our standard testing process, testing the sharpness of the lens at each available resolution using the Imatest software suite. In PureView mode the results were a little softer than we'd like—it scored 1,332 lines per picture height at 3 megapixels, 1,518 lines at 5 megapixels, and 1,681 lines at 8 megapixels. It was only in the full 38-megapixel format that it exceeded the 1,800 lines required for a sharp photo—it scored an impressive 2,088 lines there. This is better all around than the camera on the iPhone 4S—it only resolved 1,186 lines.

Imatest also measures noise, which the PureView system promises to combat. In full-resolution mode the camera is able to keep noise under 1.5 percent through ISO 200 and captures excellent detail at this setting. ISO 400 is a bit noisier at 1.8 percent, but detail remains very good. Noise creeps up to 1.9 percent at ISO 800, and detail suffers, but it's still a very usable setting.

Regardless of which PureView resolution you select, the camera manages to control noise through ISO 800, and the downsized images look quite good in terms of detail. You'll obviously lose the ability to make big prints at the lowest resolution, but as most camera phone photos are destined for Twitter or Facebook, this isn't a major concern.

Where the phone really lags behind a dedicated camera is in speed. Launching the camera app and taking a photo takes about 2 seconds and the shutter lag is a lethargic 0.8-second. Shot to shot time in PureView mode is a respectable 1.1 second between photos, but shooting at full resolution slows that to about 2.8 seconds. The shutter lag is the killer issue here—even a no-frills point-and-shoot like the Panasonic Lumix DMC-SZ7 ($199.99, 3 stars) only makes you wait 0.2-second between shutter press and image capture.

The N808 records 1080p30 video in MP4 format. Footage is very sharp and colorful, and you can zoom in and out while recording without sacrificing quality. Audio is very clear, even in a loud environment like the streets of Manhattan. There is video stabilization, which works best when zoomed all the way out, but I noticed some jitters when reviewing the footage of the camera tracking action. If you don't want to fill up your memory card too quickly, you can also record SD footage at 30fps.
Those are the numbers. But how is the camera to actually use? We can say with confidence that, in good light, it's the best phone camera we've shot with. The resolution is excellent, but there are foibles. The automatic white balance is a little finicky. Shooting outside on a bright day, we framed a shot completely in the shadows and the blue construction barrier we were shooting ended up looking a bit green. You can easily fix this in iPhoto or Lightroom, but it's something you shouldn't have to adjust—there is a manual white balance setting, which is one more thing to keep track of when shooting. The camera does do a very good job of nailing exposure, even in mixed lighting. If you want to darken or brighten a scene there is an EV Compensation option, along with a live histogram to warn you if whites or blacks are being clipped from your photo.

Our lab tests show that the camera is capable of pretty good performance in dim light—but if you want to get good shots, you're going to have to take responsibility for at least some level of manual control. Nokia has set the automatic mode to go all the way down to a minimum shutter speed of 1/8 second, which makes it quite difficult to get a steady handheld shot. If you're indoors, you'd be well served to set the ISO manually—you can go up to 800 and get some very nice photos—to help prevent motion blur. You should also remember that, because of the way that PureView works, a shot at a higher ISO that is zoomed in will look worse than one that has not been zoomed.

Most folks will want to stick to one of the PureView settings—we found 8 megapixels to be the best balance between resolution and performance in dimmer light. But when you've got enough light to use the camera at a lower ISO, you have the option of shooting 38-megapixel stills. The quality wowed us. We compared a shot of a construction barrier taken with the N808 with the same subject shot with the Pentax K-5 ($1,249.95, 3.5 stars), a 16-megapixel D-SLR. In terms of capturing the detail of fine textures the results were very close. The Nokia's camera doesn't have an anti-alias filter, which helps improve image sharpness. This isn't to say that the phone is a replacement for an SLR, but under the right conditions, it can hold its own.

Can the PureView replace your point-and-shoot camera? There's not a clear answer. If you're a casual photographer and don't want to worry too much about shooting settings you'll probably find that a compact camera in automatic mode suits your needs better—but it's one more thing to carry. With a little bit of effort you can get some very nice photos from the camera—you just have to remember to manually set the ISO when shooting in dimmer light. It's better to think of the 808 PureView as the camera that you always have with you—you'll want to keep the nice camera around for family gatherings and events, but if you see, say, a man playing the bagpipes on the subway, the PureView will do a good job in helping you to capture the moment.

Conclusions
And that, in a nutshell, is why the 808 PureView exists. But is it enough? The phone rides entirely on the basis of its camera and exclusivity. Otherwise, it's a 2014 camera in a 2007 smartphone. If you're a die-hard Symbian fan and have the means, you may want the 808 PureView in your pocket for a few weeks, before retiring it to a shelf next to your prized, sealed-box Motorola StarTAC. Otherwise, we can't recommend the 808 PureView to anyone else. The software is too archaic and balky, there are too many bugs, and after all those revisions, Nokia still didn't get the touch UI right. Symbian's glory days preceded touch screens, and Windows Phone is Nokia's future.

Nearly all smartphone buyers looking for an unlocked handset should instead head straight for a Samsung Galaxy S II, HTC One X, or HTC One S, all of which you can snag on Amazon or a comparable retailer for less than the 808 PureView. All of those phones include a thoroughly modern OS, dual-core processors, faster graphics, a much more robust third-party app market, better call quality, higher-resolution screens, 4G data speeds... and the list goes on. And they all have good cameras, not to mention any of the subsidized phones in our Best Camera Phones roundup. In the end, the 808 PureView is an amazing piece of technology that we can't recommend to anyone. Despite its groundbreaking camera, the 808 PureView will likely quickly fade into history, and become a piece of tech trivia and nothing more.