The second generation of Nokia's 41MP PureView sensor technology makes in a non-Symbian smartphone with the Lumia 1020, a Windows Phone 8 handset promising to "reinvent zoom, enabling people to discover more detail than the eye can see."
Readers with longer memories will remember PureView making its debut in the 808 PureView, a Symbian-powered oddity sporting an admittedly impressive camera and very little else.
In the Lumia 1020 the sensor is paired with 6-lens Zeiss optics, manual shutter, xenon flash (for different light levels), second generation optical stabilisation and a Nokia Pro Camera app for flash, focus, ISO, white balance, shutter speed and exposure adjustment. Nokia also promises blur-free video (at up to 1920x1080) with Rich Recording for distortion-free stereo sound.
While massive photos are impressive to print, they are less handy for sharing online-- so the Lumia 1020 automatically takes 5MP versions of each shot for exactly that.
Aside from the camera the handset is perhaps less impressive. It features a 4.5-inch AMOLED display, 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor and 32GB of internal storage, all inside white, gray or yellow plastic casing.
“We want to take people on a journey from capturing pictures to recording and sharing their lives," Nokia CEO Stephen Elop says. But will customers want a device whose operating system lacks something as basic as native Instagram and Snapchat apps? We will know once it launches in our territories sometime during Q3 2013.