Nokia ignited a bit of a controversy on Monday when it unveiled a smartphone with a 41 megapixel camera sensor dubbed the 808 PureView. Yes, you read that right—41 megapixels, not 14, or 4.1. It will soon be possible to buy a smartphone with as many megapixels as some low-end, medium-format digital SLRs.
Has Nokia completely succumbed to the megapixel myth? Well, no. Instead of positioning the PureView as the smartphone equivalent of a professional digital camera, Nokia is turning the conventional thinking that originally drove the increasing pixel counts of digital cameras on its head, and developing novel ways to exploit an overabundance of pixel data.
While we think there is room to criticize Nokia's specific implementation, there are plenty of good ideas wrapped in the "PureView technology" rubric that we think other smartphone makers—or for that matter, digital camera manufacturers—should consider.