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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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