Nokia announced its new non-Windows Phone flagship phone known as the Nokia 808 PureView. Its main feature? A whopping 41 megapixel camera! That’s even more than a high-end DSLR camera! But is it really?

Before I begin, let me just give a little information on the specs of the phone. The Nokia 808 PureView is powered by Symbian Belle with a 640 x 360 4 inch LCD, dimensions at 123.9 x 60.2 x 13.9 inches and weighing in at 5.96 oz.  It has a 1.3 GHz processor with 512 MB RAM and has 16 GB internal memory with support for a micro SD for additional storage. It is juiced up by a 1400 mAh Li-ion battery for a total talk time of 11 hours on 2G, 6.5 hours on 3G, and 540 hours standby time. It supports GSM UMTS/HSPA with 850, 900, 1700, 1900, and 2100 bands and will be offered in Europe for now.

Now about that camera. At 41 megapixels, it is certainly a little more than the high-end DSLR camera but here is the catch. Nokia did a little R&D magic by condensing four or five pixels into one pixel and if you know anything about cameras, you know that the more megapixels results in a bigger file. But with this clever trick, the file size on each picture taken will be much smaller.

The most megapixels a DSLR has as of now is 39 megapixels.  But technically, DSLR still has more. Why? Because these are “condensed” pixels. They aren’t true 41 mp quality. Rather Nokia sacrificed digital zooming for a larger sensor area and “smart zooming”. Smart zooming is just taking a photo but with lower megapixels. One might say this is bad but due to the condensed pixels, the pixels become “un-condensed” causing no degradation of quality.  Zooming in a DSLR is better of course, but I’ll give Nokia credit, they’ve done a fabulous job revolutionizing the camera phone.