The Nokia 808 PureView (full review here) is a Symbian smartphone with a staggeringly well specified camera.
ThePureView is chunky and built to last. The lens and flash are recessed and protected by a lozenge of shiny metal. This is a heavy phone, at 169g.
The finish of the back and sides of the PureView is a little plasticky, but it is easy to maintain a grip.
The front of the 808 PureView is alomost edge to edge glass, with a chunky bezel at the top which holds the speaker, and a thin white sliver of casing all the way around.
As well as the 4-inch touchscreen the front of the 808 PureView hosts a power button that also allows you to access a phone menu to put the phone in offline mode. There's a home key and a green 'phone' button with which to make calls. There's also a red 'hang up' button.
Up top there's a USB socket for charging and data transfer. You also get a headphone socket and mini-HDMI output.Other hardware controls include a volume rocker - this is the zoom control when you are using the camera (although pinch and zoom on the screen works better). There's also a lock key and a dedicated camera button.
Slip off the back cover and you'll find a removable battery and a microSD socket. Here's where you also input your Micro SIM.
The 808 PureView has 512MB of RAM and a 1.3GHz processor. Combined with the relatively light footprint of Symbian this makes for a perfectly zippy handset.
The Symbian Belle OS looks dated, but is a perfectly functional and responsive touchscreen operating system. The lack of apps is made up for by the fact that most major functions are catered for out of the box: functional web browser, social app, QuickOffice and so on.
The Nokia 808 PureView has a 41 Megapixel camera. It also boasts a reasonably sized sensor that means photos have more detail and less distortion. Even blown up, you shouldn't see grainy images, and you should get decent depth of field too.
The Nokia 808 PureView has a decent focal length and a large aperture, and the 41Mp camera uses pixel oversampling to cram all that detail into normal sized shots, meaning that images are crisp and sharp.
There's Carl Zeiss-branded optics, and a large Xenon flash that works well. You can take photos via both onscreen touch button and a hardware button under your right forefinger as you hold the PureView to take a picture. And although the zoom is digital, the large sensor means that it is in effect lossless.
By default the PureView captures 5 Megapixel images. You can choose to take 8 or 2 Megapixelp snaps, although at the top end the 808 PureView can capture up to 38Mp photos in 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios.
As a camera it is exceptionally easy to use. There are a host of manual controls adjusted via the touchscreen, but the Automatic settings work pretty well too. And because this is a camera in smartphone clothing, the ability to make minor adjustments using the touchscreen is much more intuitive that that of the majority of dedicated cameras.
A great camera attached to a mediocre smartphone at a hefty price, we award the Nokia 808 PureView three stars.
