So Mobile World Congress wrapped up in Barcelona this week and I've had three browser tabs open since Sunday just refreshing liveblogs like a crazy person. Work was rough enough that I only half paid attention Monday, but by today I'd caught up on everything and I need to talk about the Nokia 808 PureView because its genuinely the weirdest phone news I've read in months.
Nokia put a 41 megapixel camera sensor in a phone. Forty. One. Megapixels. With a Carl Zeiss lens on top of it. My digital SLR (the beat up Rebel I bought used off a guy on Craigslist back in 2009) doesn't even shoot that high. The idea, from what I can tell, isn't that you actually want 41MP photos clogging up your memory card, its that Nokia is using all that extra resolution to do pixel oversampling, basically combining a bunch of pixels into one to cut down on noise and let you do lossless zoom. Clever, actually. And it still runs Symbian, which is sort of sad because the hardware sounds incredible and the software is basically a dead platform walking at this point. Nokia is all in on Windows Phone now with the Lumia line, so this PureView thing feels like one last flex from the old guard before they close that chapter for good. I dont know if itll sell well outside of camera nerds but I respect the audacity of it.
Meanwhile HTC announced the One X on Sunday and honestly that ones easier to wrap my head around. Quad core Tegra 3 chip, 4.7 inch screen, the whole One series (X, S, and V) replacing that confusing mess of HTC phone names we've all had to squint at for the past two years. Remember trying to explain the difference between the HTC Sensation and the HTC Amaze and the HTC Rezound to your mom? Nobody could keep that straight, myself included, and I write about this stuff. So the rebrand alone is welcome even before you get to the specs.
What strikes me watching all this from my couch is how much MWC has become the "real" flagship show now, more than CES back in January even. CES this year felt like it was mostly TVs and random gadgets nobody asked for, but MWC is where the actual phones that people will be holding in their hands come this summer get announced. Thats a shift from a few years ago when everything got saved for the fall.
Anyway none of this is stuff I can afford right now. My current phone is a year and a half old and the battery already sighs audibly when I open more than two apps, but between rent going up and my laptop needing a new hard drive (long story, it started clicking last week and I nearly had a heart attack backing everything up at midnight on a Tuesday) theres no room in the budget for a new phone in 2012. Ill be reading about the One X and the PureView the way some people read about sports cars, which is to say with zero intention of ever owning one, just enjoying the spec sheet as a piece of writing.
Its funny how fast the smartphone conversation has moved even just since I started this blog back in November. Every few months theres a new "biggest sensor" or "most cores" claim and it resets the whole scale. I dont think that pace slows down anytime soon either. If anything it feels like its accelerating, which is a little exhausting to keep up with as someone who writes about it for fun and not for a paycheck.
One thing I do wonder is whether Nokia waited too long. PureView is a genuinely interesting piece of engineering and I keep going back to that Zeiss lens detail, but its landing on Symbian, a platform most developers have already mentally filed under "legacy." Its a bit like putting a beautiful new engine in a car nobody's buying anymore. I hope they eventually bring that camera tech over to a Lumia, because pairing it with Windows Phone would actually make people pay attention in a way that a Symbian device just wont.
Back to the grindstone. Laptop hard drive should arrive Thursday if the shipping estimate holds, and I've got a backlog of half finished posts sitting in drafts that I keep meaning to get to.