And it almost does. This award winning phone has an enormous 41 Mega Pixel Carl Zeiss lens! Only thing is, it's a Smartphone (Read the blog - I'm allergic to them). But not really like today's Smartphones. It runs on something called Symbian (Belle), which is like a prehistoric phone operating system. Nah, it's not that bad. I prefer old anyway. This being released in mid 2012, it's not old enough! I love the old green screen Nokia 1100. It's called Monochrome if you want to get technical. Symbian may be old to some, but many users still think that Symbian is great. Anyway, forget about what's not important and check out some of the video footage and images that this phone is capable of producing in the video below.
The camera quality really does looks excellent. And bear in mind when uploading a video to Youtube some of the sharpness and overall quality is lost. Remember to switch the video to 1080p (HD) when viewing. I believe that Nokia no longer produce phones with this operating system. The Nokia 808 PureView was the last one ever to have it installed. Nokia's new high spec phones run on the Microsoft OS. As a result they no longer offer support for the Symbian phones still out there either. Fantastic!
So does that sill make the 808 a Smartphone, or now that it's outdated (to the ever-so materialistic fashion police), does that put it on par with an up to date non-Smartphone? Nah, not quite. It's still a Smartphone whichever way you look at it. However, for it's superb camera I would be willing to put the "It has to be a non-Smartphone" requirement aside and actually buy this phone just to use the camera. Oh no. Hold on, I can't. It's touch screen! The camera would literally need to be Broadcast quality to convince me to purchase.
So okay, we've got a now old and outdated phone which happens to contain one of the best camera's ever put in a phone known to man and I want to buy one. With all the new Xperia's, iPhones and Samsung S6's, this golden oldie has got to be well forgotten about by now and be as cheap as chips to purchase. Right? Wrong!
This phone costs an eye! Well, it's not that much. Maybe just a few fingers. The equivalent of about 100 packs of Birdseye Fish Fingers! Am I way off? But even used, the cheapest I found was £200. Brand new it's over £350. Actually, just checking on eBay and it can be snapped up for much less. £130 used. However, after just checking the specification I see that the SAR Level for this phone is well over 1W/kg. It's averaging at 1.23 W/kg. That is pretty high. The consolation is that it does have a loudspeaker, and of course, hands free kit options.
I would still buy this phone. But one of the things I don't like about the used ones being sold on eBay is that most have a library image of the phone and say it's in a used condition with some light scratches on the screen etc. That's fine in terms of telling me the condition. But you have to actually show me the real phone that I'm buying so I know what I am buying and what to expect when it arrives. I hate it when sellers do that. Laziness.. Have I talked myself out of it.. Probably yes. My photographic memory will keep me going for now. And it's free.
Apparently, the Samsung Note 4 also has an excellent camera. They are expensive and far too new for me to be bothered with. For that kind of money you can buy a nice Bridge Camera with good image quality and a really good zoom distance. Or even a cheap, old school DSLR. Not a film one! Did I tell you that I'm using my old trusty 486 DX Desktop PC to write this post? Or am I.. Now that's old skool for ya..
