BW Communities

No Ordinary Phone, This

BW Online Bureau Nov 08, 2014

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root available-locales="en_US," default-locale="en_US"><static-content language-id="en_US"><![CDATA[This is no ordinary phone. That much is clear if you have caught any of the recent buzz about how a smartphone is coming loaded with a 41 megapixel camera inside it.  The immediate reaction, back at the Consumer Electronics Show this February, where Nokia showcased the PureView 808, was to dismiss it as a marketing gimmick. After all, who even needed 41 megapixels in a phone?  They say you learn the most about a person within the first few moments of meeting. I'm beginning to think this is true of phones as well. The moment you hold the 808 in your hand, you know what it's all about — the camera. In case you had any doubts, the big bulge, staring at you Cyclops-like from the back of the phone, will dispel them. This is the 1/1.2 inch Carl Zeiss sensor and you immediately forgive it for being that big, making the device top-heavy, because a bigger sensor means more light and information for better quality pictures.  <table style="width: 100px;" align="left" border="0" cellpadding="8" cellspacing="8"> <tbody> <tr> <td><img src="/businessworld/system/files/images/July/GADGETS_mdm.jpg" height="200" width="200"></td> </tr> <tr> <td>(Bloomberg)</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> On the front, it looks like most phones do, just with more pronounced curves. It's a 4-inch Amoled capacitive with a 640 x 360 pixel touchscreen. I spent a whole minute ranting about why the phone wasn't in the brilliant red in which it's also supposed to be available. In fact, it hit me that the red of anything is just never available. Why? Then I forgot the red, settled for the matte white, and got in to quickly find the camera. Actually, there's a dedicated two-stage camera button on the side of the phone, but I'd quite forgotten that.  My first picture with the 808 was, from about four feet away, of a newspaper on the table. I just clicked without planning or fiddling with settings, flash, or the lighting in the room. I don't really read newspapers in print these days as they don't get along with my eyesight. I tapped on the picture to zoom and to my amazement, I could read every word on the visible part of the page. Well, that's one way to do it!  In the same way, pictures of a rug go right into the weave; photos of a cushion show the separate threads, and a shot in someone's office let me happily read all the papers on his desk, a fact I hope he'll only notice when it's too late. And all this is with indoor (read low light) conditions. The photo of a running fan turns out still and sharp, frozen instantly by the Xenon flash. Outdoor shots were equally interesting, showing good depth of field. Focusing on one object nearby sharpens it while blurring out what's in the distance. And vice versa. One can get motion shots, bokeh, night pictures, spotlight shots, and more. There's no HDR (High Dynamic Range) mode but you can use the bracketing capture mode to let you take multiple shots and use software to process them — rather hard work and not very necessary. The aperture is F2.4. Shutter speed is fast. There's a bit of basic editing on the camera itself, such as effects, cropping and rotate. One annoyance is that the photos have to be manually rotated to fit the screen orientation. But overall, shooting with the 808 is quick and easy, the on-screen button being a bit nicer than the dedicated button which could shake your hand.  Just as often as I'd get surprising detail in a picture, I'd also get terrible pictures. A random shot, even with everything set to automatic, would result in a washed out image or not-real tints. I quickly realised it's all about the settings. This is a capable camera, but you need to explore and understand the settings to take advantage of its capabilities. Getting used to it can take a couple of days but once you know what the camera's sensitive settings like, you can use it to best advantage. Cameras on other phones don't match up to some of the 808's possibilities — but only as long as you know or can learn to adjust settings for different conditions. You can't just whip it out, take a shot, and be certain that it'll be brilliant and better than what any other phone can take every time.  <table style="width: 100px;" align="right" border="0" cellpadding="8" cellspacing="8"> <tbody> <tr> <td><img src="/businessworld/system/files/images/July/Nokia-808_2_BB_387x150.jpg" height="150" width="387"></td> </tr> <tr> <td>SMART CAMERA The 808 has a 41MP camera with aCarl Zeiss lens</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> Someone rightly said that the 808 is like two cameras. The PureView, and the Full Resolution. You have three modes of settings, actually. One of these is Automatic, which is self-explanatory. The other is Scenes, or presets. The third is Creative, which is where you need to tinker with settings, trying out how to get the best images. The Creative mode lets you shoot full resolution resulting in 38 with 4:3 ratio or 34 megapixel with 16:9 radio photos. These are Raw files and you can take them off the device to edit and even print out in large size. Connecting the phone to a computer, incidentally, leads to a quick and easy transfer of photos. You take pictures in 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios, each requiring its own optimum settings and resulting in different image quality. You can also change other settings such as jpeg quality, colour tone, saturation, contrast and sharpness.  Also in the Creative mode are the PureView oversampling options, which is where Nokia's secret sauce comes in. You have the same choices, but here the resulting pictures will be 3, 5 or 8 megapixel strength, with 5 megapixels being the recommended. This is the mode where high quality is squeezed into fewer pixels.   There's a Facebook button on the camera's interface. But all said and done, this isn't really the kind of device you need if you want to take quick shots to post to Instagram, if you're addicted to that. Some of the apps you see on Android and iOS won't be visible here, in fact, and if you want a great deal more than the camera, you should consider other options.  The 808 also takes excellent video: full HD 1080p with 4x lossless zoom. There are two microphones to capture a range of frequencies in stereo sound. This brings videos alive. Nokia has also teamed up with Dolby Laboratories for amazing sound. One tends to forget that because of the camera, but the truth is you could also use it as a music player. And as an on-the-go movie player. The Dolby Digital Plus software delivers 5.1 surround sound. I also heard it on a home theatre system where it sounded brilliant.  As a smartphone, the 808 doesn't match up to the premium Galaxy S3, HTC One X or the iPhone in smart responsiveness but it surpasses all of them in the camera department. People are fond of saying that it's really a camera with a calling function, but the 808 does have apps, widgets and all the basics of a smartphone today such as browsing, e-mail, and games. It just doesn't feel as snappy and fluid, but at the same time, it isn't like you can do nothing else but take pictures. It has an awful, seriously cramped keyboard. The 808 runs on a 1.3GHz single core processor, has great battery life, and is NFC enabled.  At around Rs 33,000, the 808 sits in the same segment as other coveted smartphones, however. While Nokia is justified in placing the 808 at a premium when no other phone can quite do what it does, the truth is that it's a specialist phone, excelling at one thing, even if it does others. Well, three, if you count video and sound (read excellent music) separately. More than other smartphones, the 808 competes with point-and-shoots, actually "blowing away" most of them. It doesn't replace low-end DSLRs, but because of its handiness, is a serious contender for amateurs or in some situations in which one doesn't want to carry a larger camera.   But with today's smartphones, photography has, in a way, gone down in quality from the purists' point of view and most people are quite happy to shoot with whatever's quickest and most handy as long as they can set it to interesting filters and effects and whiz it off to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other networks. They don't necessarily want pictures of high quality, showing every spot on every face, every blemish on every surface. The PureView may not be for them. It's all about detail, which is why it's for those who don't want an ordinary phone. Mala(at)pobox(dot)com, (at)malabhargava on Twitter (This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 09-07-2012)