So Mobile World Congress kicked off in Barcelona yesterday and I've had about eighteen browser tabs open since about 7am trying to keep up with it. Most of it is the usual firehose of mid-range Android phones nobody will remember by summer (looking at you, entire Galaxy Ace/mini/Beam lineup Samsung just dumped on us all at once), but one thing actually stopped me mid-scroll: the Nokia 808 PureView.
Forty-one megapixels. On a phone. I had to read that twice.
Okay so it's not really a 41MP camera in the way your brain wants to think about it — Nokia's whole pitch is that the sensor is so absurdly oversized that it uses pixel oversampling to produce cleaner, sharper 5MP or 8MP shots than you'd get from a "normal" phone camera, and then lets you do lossless zoom by just cropping into that giant sensor instead of digital zoom garbage. Carl Zeiss lens, 1080p video that supposedly keeps continuous autofocus while recording. On paper this thing makes my old point-and-shoot look embarrassing, and I say that as someone who dropped $180 on a Canon PowerShot two Christmases ago that's basically just sitting in a drawer now.
Here's my problem with it though, and I don't think I'm being a contrarian jerk here: it runs Symbian. Belle, specifically, which is apparently the newest and supposedly best version of Symbian, but come on. It's 2012. Nokia had their whole "burning platform" moment over a year ago, Elop already told everyone the future is Windows Phone, and now they're putting their single most impressive piece of hardware engineering in years onto an OS that even Nokia has publicly admitted is on its way out. It's like building a beautiful house on land you've already sold. Rumor is it'll run about 450 euros when it actually ships sometime in Q2, no US date that I've seen yet, and I'd bet real money most of the people buying one will be camera nerds who don't care what OS is under the hood, not people picking their next daily driver phone.
I still kind of want one. Which annoys me, honestly, because I know exactly how this goes — I'll read six more hands-on writeups over the next few days, get super into it, and then never actually buy it because by the time it's available here I'll have talked myself into just waiting for whatever Nokia's Windows Phone flagship ends up being instead. Ive done this exact dance with hardware before (see: the Motorola Xoom, RIP my $600, still bitter about that one) and I'd like to say Ive learned my lesson but I clearly havent.
The other thing I keep seeing mentioned alongside all the phone stuff is Facebook's CTO doing some kind of special session kicking off the mobile app track at the show. Havent found a full writeup of what was actually said yet, just people live-tweeting fragments, so Im not going to pretend I know the substance of it. But it's a little telling that Facebook is important enough to mobile carriers and manufacturers now that they get a keynote slot at MWC. Three years ago that wouldve been unthinkable, a random-ish web app getting stage time at the biggest telecom industry show on earth.
Anyway. My actual point in writing this, before I got sidetracked complaining about my Xoom money, is just that this Nokia camera thing is a genuinely interesting piece of engineering wrapped in a business decision that makes no sense to me, and I think that combination is going to keep happening all week as the rest of the MWC announcements roll in. Samsung's apparently got a 10.1 inch Note tablet coming too, stylus and all, which is its own whole conversation Ill probably get into once I actually see hands-on photos instead of spec sheets.
For now Im just sitting here refreshing GSMArena like it's my job, which today I guess it kind of is.