Reports of Nokia bringing this technology to a Windows Phone device surfaced in January, and based on this video from ViziLeaks and spotted by The Verge, it appears Nokia is at least testing a phone design. The marking of XX for the number of megapixels would suggest this is a test device and the actual sensor resolution will instead be displayed in lieu of the XX:

Unlike traditional smartphone cameras, PureView uses a mechanical shutter, which can be seen in the video. Although no sample shots have leaked yet, here are a few from the original PureView 808 device captured by the All About Symbian blog. Be sure to view the images at full size to see the detail when zoomed in.

No other mobile phone has such camera technology, so this could be just what Nokia, Microsoft and Windows Phone need to stand out from the crowd. Although I’m certain Nokia has been refining the technology, it’s surely going to require a thicker phone when compared to its peers. For true mobile photo enthusiasts, however, it could be just the thing to get more people to try a Lumia.

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Here in Europe, people don’t like their phones too thick and plasticky, and that’s been a consistent criticism levelled at the Lumia 920, Nokia’s previous flagship, and for that matter the very similar-looking 928. The 925 makes things sleek and metallic (I like metal; I used to be a proud owner of the Nokia E71) and is, at 139g, significantly lighter than the 920 (185g) and 928 (163g).

The 8.7-megapixel camera has 6 elements, rather than the 5 found in the 920 and 928, and wireless charging comes courtesy of a snap-on cover rather than being built in, but otherwise it’s really, really similar to the 928: 1GB RAM; 1,280 x 768-pixel, 4.5-inch OLED screen; dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm processor; and so on.

Here’s how IHS Screen Digest mobile chief Ian Fogg reacted as the unveiling happened:

Strong hardware similarities of #Lumia 925 to 7 month old 920 shows how much #Nokia is held back by Windows Phone’s sparse hardware support—
Ian Fogg (@ianfogg42) May 14, 2013

And there’s the thing. You can tell Nokia didn’t have that much to shout about in hardware terms, because its main message around the 925 is the around the photo-centric apps it’s pre-installing, namely Hipstamatic’s Oggl and Nokia’s own Smart Camera software, which clearly seeks to rival Samsung’s recent efforts in the Galaxy S4. This is all good and fine, but exciting? Not so much.

Look lower

But even if the limitations of the Windows Phone platform don’t allow Nokia to truly exercise its innovation muscles, that doesn’t mean the Finnish handset maker is taking it easy. Just look at what it’s doing at the low end of its range, once we’re out of Microsoft territory.

As I pointed out a few weeks ago, the QWERTY-enabled Asha 210 offers an incredible amount of social functionality for its $72 price tag (the Lumia 925 costs just north of $600). And just last Thursday, Nokia revealed the Asha 501, a touchscreen device that runs the new version of Nokia’s S40-derived operating system and also comes in at under $100.

The new version of Asha comes with features such as Fastlane, a second homescreen option that provides direct access to recently accessed contacts and apps, rather than showing a conventional grid of apps. This is all a result of Nokia’s purchase in early 2012 of Smarterphone, a Norwegian company that tries to make so-called featurephones seem, well, smarter.

Nokia has come in for a lot of flak for calling its all-touch Ashas “smartphones”, with many seeing this as a trick to inflate its real smartphone shipment figures. That may be one motivation, but I honestly think Nokia has every right to call these devices smart. When the 501 came out, Nokia also made a major push for developers to address the revamped Asha platform, releasing a new SDK and new in-app payment tools. Apps that are already on or in development for the platform include Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Twitter, and also games from the likes of EA and Gameloft.

Sure, heavier apps are lacking, but frankly the kinds of apps we’re talking about there might be better executed on a tablet than a smartphone anyway – particularly given the excellent battery life promised by Asha phones, Asha-plus-tablet is starting to look like a pretty tempting combo.

Who’s smart now?

Of course, the big promise with Windows Phone these days is that it will hit lower and lower price points, perhaps becoming a viable rival to low-mid-range Android devices at some stage (right now Nokia has only managed to cross the $200 threshold with Windows Phone products, namely the Lumia 520). These Ashas are already targeting the same rivals, though, and they are more optimized for the price point than efforts based on Google’s OS.

Nokia is clearly putting a large amount of effort into industrial design and user experience for both the Windows Phone and Asha ranges. However, it has way more freedom to tinker with its own platform. There’s also the small matter of price — the Lumia 925 costs 6 times as much as the Asha 501 so, if customers respond well to the new version of the Asha platform, the potential impact of the 501 will be greater than that of the Lumia 925. (That is admittedly a big “if”, though, as last quarter’s results showed roughly even sales for Lumia and full-touch Asha phones, with Lumia heading up and Asha down.)

The Lumia 925 sure does look fine, and if I was in the market for a high-end smartphone I’d give it strong consideration. However, in terms of making a real splash, the innovations Nokia is making at the low end come through more starkly than the tweaks made to its Lumia range.

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There isn’t much to see in the video, spotted by The Verge on Sunday, as Nokia is keeping most details under wraps until the big reveal. It’s clear that in typical Nokia fashion, the company is planning to play upon its strength of camera quality. The teaser ad clearly shows two flashes on the rear of the camera along with a raised bump where the camera sensor lies. Either the phone is extremely thin or the sensor is larger than current Nokia Lumia phones use.

I suspect the latter as Nokia has been working on its PureView technology, with one example phone being the Nokia PureView 808. That device — more of a concept than anything else, although you can purchase one — offers a 41 megapixel sensor that allows for tremendously detailed photos even when zoomed in. The video also alludes to this concept suggesting the phone will capture “more than your eyes can see”.

It’s also likely that Nokia will move away from their standard polycarbonate material for the phone’s body and instead use a metal casing. That could eliminate the wireless charging feature found on current Lumia’s but would help reduce the weight of the handset.

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Although neither company released many specification details of phone, the Lumia 928 is very likely an improved Lumia 920. That phone launched last year as an AT&T exclusive and is considered to be a flagship, high-end model. Here’s a first look at the new Lumia:

Like that phone, the Lumia 928 offers a 4.5-inch OLED screen with Gorilla Glass for protection. It also features an 8.7 megapixel PureView camera with Carl Zeiss optics, Xenon flash and optical image stabilization; something Nokia showed off earlier this week on video. The new Lumia also supports wireless charging.

I think the pricing on this device is quite aggressive when compared to flagship phones running on other platforms. Then again, it probably needs to be. While having a high-end Lumia on one of the largest U.S. carriers can only help Nokia — and Windows Phone 8 sales, for that matter — the price point can help the Lumia 928 stand out from the flagship crowd.

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If you get motion sickness easily, I’d be cautious watching the video: It’s taken with all three phones at night with some parts on a moving roller coaster called The Hurricane.

After watching the video, I can’t see anyone disputing the Lumia 928 as a clear winner. It handles the low-light extremely well and uses optical image stabilization to smooth out the bumps and turns while riding the coaster. And it’s smart of Nokia to focus — no pun intended — on the features and expertise it brings to smartphones. Hopefully, this footage is from an actual Lumia 928: I’d hate to see a repeat of Nokia’s camera demo faux pas from last year.

But there’s a reason why iPhone models take up the first three spots in the top five most-used cameras on Flickr: They take all-around great shots and they’re super simple to use. Will the Lumia 928 win out over its peers in low-light situations? Most assuredly, although the HTC One is quite good in the same scenario. What else will the Lumia 928 offer to sway buyers, however? That’s the missing piece of this picture.

This post was updated at 3:12pm to reflect the Galaxy S 3 was used for comparison.

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We’ve covered Pelican before. The startup has designed an “array camera” that is essentially composed of multiple smaller cameras, all organized in an array. Why do this? Because when you get to the tiny form factor required of handset cameras, the sensor is so small that you’re highly limited in terms of the number of megapixels you can squeeze out of it before image noise becomes unbearable. New approaches are needed, and this is one of them.

Of course, if using many tiny cameras was that easy, we’d see it done in smartphones already. The secret sauce lies in the software used to bring the multiple resulting images together, and it’s that part of Pelican’s work that seems to have attracted the interest of Nokia Growth Partners.

“It’s very complicated to do this algorithmically and Pelican is one of the companies that has mastered this technology,” partner Bo Ilsoe was quoted in the piece as saying.

Imaging is central to Nokia’s current handset strategy, from its top-end Lumia Windows Phone smartphones down to its cheap Asha phones — all these devices have clever photo-taking features of one kind or another. The standout model there, so far, is the Symbian-toting 808 PureView, which uses a technique called oversampling to get something usable out of a 41-megapixel image (the same technology is apparently coming to the Lumia line, too). However, that camera module is rather chunky — something which array cameras are designed to fix.

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The service is for companies that want to quickly roll out a ride-sharing scheme for their employees – as is generally the case with such schemes, the advantages range from greater environment-friendliness to lower petrol costs and the need for fewer parking places. As Peter Graf, SAP’s sustainability chief, put it in a statement:

“We’ve combined our mobile and cloud technologies into a carpooling solution to help provide immediate economic, environmental and social benefits to companies and their employees. As such, we expect TwoGo to not only help people and businesses save money and greenhouse gas emissions, but to also connect people more closely with each other and with the company they work for.”

TwoGo works on the web and on mobile devices. Employees can enter their travel preferences, after which Nokia’s Here platform kicks in to display likely matches. Here is (in this writer’s opinion) Nokia’s big hedge against a post-hardware future, and this deal is significant for taking the location-based services platform into the enterprise. “We believe that location will be the new frontier of technology across industries,” Nokia mapping chief Christof Hellmis said in the statement.

Although it is particularly well-suited to large enterprises — the travel giant Thomas Cook is the first announced customer, having taken part in the beta program – SAP is also pitching TwoGo at smaller companies, as employees of neighbouring businesses can share rides too.

Handily, TwoGo also works with the likes of Microsoft Outlook and Google Apps (anything iCal-compatible will do) so that ride schedules can be integrated with corporate calendars. SAP has been using TwoGo internally for almost two years, and claims to have “generated more than $5 million in value for the company” through fuel and maintenance savings, lower travel expense reimbursements, cutting down on emissions and, of course, getting more employees talking to one another as they travel to work and back.

According to a separate blog post from Nokia, TwoGo is currently available for licensing by companies in the U.S. and Germany, with other countries coming online soon.

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The Asha 210, which will come in both single- and dual-SIM versions with retail prices starting at $72, has a physical QWERTY keyboard and is therefore well-suited to messaging and social networking services. The handset will come with a free subscription to WhatsApp, which usually costs $0.99 a year, and the service is also integrated with the 210′s phonebook.

“We are very excited about our partnership with Nokia Asha complementing our strategy of giving people around the world an easy experience when keeping in touch with their friends,” WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton said in a statement.

Like other Asha phones, the device runs the Series 40 operating system. Nokia started calling the touchscreen Asha phones (of which the 210 is not one) “smartphones” last year, much to the annoyance of some observers, but in some ways that was a fair move: after all, Series 40 handset owners also get to download apps from an app store that contains many of the offerings familiar from Android and iOS. The social experience that is the focus for many “proper” smartphone users can be found here too, albeit in a slightly cut-down fashion.

The Asha 210 comes preloaded with YouTube, Twitter and Facebook (the recently-launched Asha 205 came with a dedicated Facebook button) and a 2MP camera with its own hard key. As with the 205, a feature called Slam makes it possible to share content with nearby Bluetooth phones without having to pair the devices. The phone’s battery lasts for up to 46 days on the single-SIM version, and up to 24 days on the dual-SIM version – you don’t see this kind of longevity on a typical touchscreen phone.

This is a great deal for WhatsApp, particularly as many of its key rivals – such as Tencent’s WeChat — are strongest in the emerging markets where Nokia’s low-end devices are sold. These alternatives can still be found in Nokia’s S40 app store, but users should be effectively steered in WhatsApp’s direction by the inclusion of the hard key. A reminder of the numbers here: WhatsApp may have 200 million users, making it “bigger than Twitter”, but WeChat has 300 million users.

And from the Nokia perspective, the Asha 210 is a reminder of what can be done with the now-aged S40 platform in certain markets. This device will be going up against very low-end Android phones, which offer a much wider range of apps but not necessarily better performance (and seriously, battery life is a major issue in many of these markets), and the soon-to-be-released Firefox OS phones, which are HTML5-only and as such an unknown quantity at this point. Given its social chops, the 210 will be a fairly impressive contender for many users.

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If the reports are true, adding a new Lumia flagship to Verizon’s lineup could offer a bump for both Windows Phone 8 and Lumia sales. Currently, Verizon offers just a single Lumia model: the Lumia 822, which is essentially last year’s hardware with updated Microsoft software. The Windows Phone 8 handset is free with contract and uses a relatively low-resolution 800 x 480 touchscreen, for example.

The Lumia 928, however, is expected to be an improved version of the Lumia 920, which debuted as an AT&T exclusive in November. Exclusive phone deals can vary, but many have six-month time frames; this adds more credence to a similar-looking Lumia flagship arriving in May. I’d expect Verizon’s Lumia 928 to have at least a 1280 x 768 display as that’s what the Lumia 920 offers. A newer dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon chip would likely power such a phone and Nokia is sure to use camera technology that touts exceptional pictures as well.

Even as a new flagship model phone, I’d be surprised if it costs more than $149 on contract with Verizon. The Lumia 920 debuted on AT&T for $99 as Nokia made a big push in the U.S. market. The company has improved its sales and average handset selling price, but to push out a Lumia 928 for $199 or more — unless there’s some radical new features or functions — doesn’t make sense to me; consumers could all too easily opt for an iPhone, HTC One or Samsung Galaxy S 4 at that price.

Right now, Nokia — and Microsoft, for that matter — are trying to build up not just Windows Phone sales. They’re also trying to broaden consumer sentiment and brand awareness in a country where 90 percent of smartphones are from the two A’s: Apple and Android.

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