Nokia's PureView smartphone, with a 41-megapixel camera sensor, apparently won't make a North American appearance anytime soon.
Nokia is
attracting a fair bit of buzz for its PureView smartphone, which features a
41-megapixel camera sensor backed by new recording and image technology.
However,
Nokias Website suggests the device wont appear
in North America, depriving shutterbugs on these shores from being able to take
ultra-high-resolution photographs with a Symbian-powered smartphone. (
Engadget seems to have noticed the exception
first.)
Nokias
engineers have shown a willingness to pursue smartphone technology down some
particularly funky avenues. A June 2011 article in
Businessweek, for example, detailed Nokia CEO
Stephen Elops visit to a company lab whose projects included a water-resistant
phone (thanks to nanoscale coating) and a hi-fi speaker integrated into a
handset. This kind of stuff has been sitting around peoples desks, because
its too hard to get anything done around here, he told the magazine. If we
can get some of this to marketthats what gives me confidence.
Clearly, some
of that higher-end tech is finding its way into Nokias ecosystem. PureView
will supposedly find its way onto Windows Phone, according to
a translation of a Nokia executives comments to
a
Finnish newspaper. But it also wont find its way
to North America in its current form.
On this side
of the Atlantic, Nokia is focused on establishing itself as the preeminent
purveyor of Windows Phone devices, having introduced models at high (the Lumia
900), medium (the Lumia 710) and low (Lumia 610) price points.
New data from
research firm Strategy Analytics suggests that Nokia has become the worlds
largest Windows Phone vendor, at 33 percent of the market, surpassing the
individual efforts of HTC and other manufacturers. The company announced it had
sold one million Windows Phone units in the fourth quarter of 2011, surpassing
some analyst expectations.
Microsoft is
prepping a Windows Phone 8 that will support multi-core processors and native
BitLocker encryption, and integrate in many ways with the upcoming Windows 8,
according to February reports on
Pocketnow.com and
Supersite for Windows. That could help
Windows Phones overall fortunes; in the year-plus since Microsoft and its
manufacturing partners began rolling out devices, the companys overall share
of the smartphone market has refused to budge.
Nokia knows it
will take much more than a 41-megapixel camera grafted onto a smartphone to
reestablish itself against aggressive competitors, such as Google Android and
Apples iPhone. But the company can still attract some buzz by showing what it
can doat least for potential customers outside North America.
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