In the weeks leading up to the Mobile World Congress, we talked about expecting Nokia to share a smartphone with the imaging capabilities necessary to make it a suitable successor to the Symbian-powered N8. Sure enough, the company announced its 808 PureView with an astonishing 41-megapixel camera. Understandably, smartphone users all over are curious to get their hands on the phone and see just what all those extra pixels are capable of. To that end, we’ve got a couple bits of news about the 808 and its camera, with a mix of both good and bad.

Bad news first: the 808 PureView doesn’t look like it will be coming to the United States nor Canada. We shouldn’t be surprised to hear that, considering how uninterested carriers have been towards Belle, but it’s disappointing all the same; certainly if one handset could have stirred-up some interest in the platform, it would be the 808. This news comes directly from Nokia, where on its developer’s site it notes that the 808 will see global availability, with the one exception of North America.

All is not lost, though, because Nokia has plenty of other avenues with which it could deliver the 808′s imaging tech to North American audiences. In fact, one Nokia exec seemed to confirm plans to introduce its PureView camera components to Windows Phone handsets while in a recent interview. She didn’t have any information on individual models which might receive these super-sized cameras, other than that they’ll be Lumia phones, but offered that it wouldn’t take long for such handsets to arrive. Presumably, when such phones are released, North America will no longer be excluded from the PureView party.

Update: The latest rumor suggests that PureView won’t come to Windows Phone until sometime mid-next-year at the earliest.

Source: Nokia, Aamulehti

Via: WPCentral, The Nokia Blog