Nokia 808 PureView will be the cameraphone to beat with whopping 41MP sensor, to arrive on Windows Phone too

UPDATE: You can view a few video and camera samples with the Nokia 808 PureView in our article here. Here is a link to the full resolution photos, seems about 10MB per piece will be the norm with the intelligent compression Nokia has applied.

Besides the news on the Windows Phone front, though, we were also expecting with baited breath something associated with the PureView brand, which all clues pointed to being a Nokia N8 successor with a giant camera sensor.

Well, the nail-biting wait is no more, we have a new claimant for the best cameraphone category. It is called the Nokia 808 PureView, with the whopping 41MP sensor with Carl-Zeiss lens, both Xenon flash plus an LED video light, f/2.4 aperture and enhanced low-light abilities. It has a 4" OLED display, 1.3GHz processor with 512MB of RAM and runs Symbian Belle, meaning 360x640 screen resolution still, but we found ourselves just staring at that huge sensor in disbelief, which, at 1/1.2" size is way larger than even the former 1/1.83" king in the Nokia N8.

The phone does 1080p video, and for stills it scales down to 38MP for 16:9 format. The 41 Megapixels allow zooming without losing quality if you shoot at standard 8MP or 5MP resolutions, though, so that might have been on Nokia's mind when deciding which camera sensor in their labs to throw in there. The phone is also ready to shoot in less than a second, which gives the Xperia S camera "Quick" mode a run for its money.

Nokia has been great at cleverly compressing its photos on the N8, so probably the 16GB internal storage won't fill as quickly as you would expect from 30+ MP photos, and there is always the microSD card. The phone will have the ability to shrink the snaps for emailing or posting on Facebook and Twitter on the fly.

Nokia's Jo Harlow said at the press event that "People will inevitably focus on the 41 megapixel sensor, but the real quantum leap is how the pixels are used to deliver breath-taking image quality at any resolution and the freedom it provides to choose the story you want to tell."

Nokia has been working for years on this sensor, and the best part is that it will be brought to future devices (nudge, wink, Windows Phone) at some point. The Nokia 808 PureView will be available in May for EUR 450 off-contract (about $600). Any takers?