Review: Nokia 808 Pureview

Earlier this year, the Nokia 808 Purview snapped the 'Best of Show' award at the Mobile World Congress. Nokia's device, aka the 41MP camera phone, is a real contender for anyone serious about their camera phone photography. Unfortunately, as it sports a large hump around the lens (or bumper, as a colleague called it), the Pureview is not exactly designed to hipster specifications.

Nonetheless, it's a great device with some neat features.

The Pureview is a somewhat bulky phone when compared to other high-end smartphones - its width ranges from 13.9mm to 17.95mm at the bulge mentioned above. It weighs in at 169g. Then again, that's lighter than any 41MP camera I've ever had (disclosure: I have never had a 41MP camera, but I'm guessing it would be heavier than this).

The Pureview's fairly large screen is encased in black plastic, which gives the phone a solid feel. It is also available in red and white. Despite the plastic body and bulky design, it doesn't look cheap. This is largely due to the gorgeous display and the Pureview's many curves.

The phone has dedicated buttons at the bottom for making and ending calls, as well as a menu key. The touch-screen has dedicated tabs to bring up menus and customise the home screen, as well as a shortcut to the phone's call history.

The right side of the phone has a camera button and lock scroll, as well as a volume rocker, while the top of the phone boasts a generous amount of inputs - ones for earphones, microUSB and micro HDMI.

The one issue I did have with the Pureview was that I had to use my fingernails to take off the back cover.

The Pureview runs on Symbian. Users can customise widgets, and navigation through the drop-down menus is fairly user-friendly. Pinch-to-zoom functionality also adds to the browsing experience and comes in handy when viewing photos.

The photo widget on the home screen is a nice feature, shuffling though photos as you navigate back and forth.

Of course, one of the downsides to the Symbian operating system is that it just doesn't compare to the likes of iOS and Android in the app department. I also found navigating between the screens and drop-down menus was not as intuitive as with other operating systems.

Call quality on the Pureview, however, was excellent - delivering clear and crisp sound quality when making and receiving calls at all times.

The screen itself is not the most responsive, making scrolling though menus frustrating at times.

Nokia's 808 Pureview is WiFi- and NFC-enabled. It can also be used as a WiFi hotspot.

The Pureview's Gorilla Glass display is gorgeous, showing vivid images in detail and with sharp edges. Even in high light conditions, the phone displayed bright images. The screen is also a nice size, at four inches.

However, the phone's resolution (640x360 pixels) is not as high as many high-end phones and a tad disappointing given the high-resolution photos the phone can take.

The Pureview runs on a 1.3GHz processor and 512MB of RAM, making it the most powerful Symbian phone around.

However, the phone still occasionally stuttered when scrolling between home screens, especially when running multiple apps.

The Pureview comes with 16GB of internal storage as well as an external SD slot, which lets users jack storage up by an additional 16GB. This is a considerable amount of storage, and should come in handy to users snapping lots of high-resolution images.

The phone's battery lasted up to two days under normal usage, including making and receiving calls as well as occasional browsing. When snapping away, this dropped to a day.

The 41MP camera boasts a lot of other features, such as ISO settings up to 1 600. Users can also opt to use pixel oversampling to take images of five or eight megapixels. Pixel oversampling uses the excess pixels to increase the level of detail in the shots.

I found the auto setting took some great pictures, while there are also predefined settings or scenes that users can pick from, depending on lighting conditions.

Adjusting settings is easy with the pull-out menu to the left, which lets users set flash, exposure, white balance and ISO. Using the volume rocker to zoom is also fairly easy. Coupling this with auto focus will help even an amateur take some great snaps.

The phone takes great images with realistic colours in auto mode, while users can also adjust saturation and contrast. Cropping photos on the device is also incredibly intuitive.

The video camera records 1080-pixel and 720HD video, making it great for taking video footage.

Nokia has also cleverly coated the camera lens in Gorilla Glass.

The 808 comes with Nokia's native map app. Nokia has also thrown in a social app, which lets users integrate their various social media accounts.

The phone also comes with Angry Birds, although it doesn't feature the full version.

The Nokia 808 Pureview has the makings of a fantastic phone. The combination of Nokia's partnership with Carl Zeiss (the brain behind the camera technology) and Microsoft will be interesting to watch when Windows Phone 8 is unveiled.

At a recommended retail price of R7 999, the Pureview will be competing with the likes of Apple's iPhone 4S, and soon-to-be-released iPhone 5, as well as the Samsung Galaxy S III, which runs on Android. Both these competitors run on more intuitive operating systems; however, none of these phones can compete with the Pureview when it comes to the camera.

I think the Pureview will enjoy some success among snappy happy consumers, but most users will probably hold out for a phone that runs on a more fluid OS.