These are the days in Helsinki when the sun ne'erseems to set. So maybe it’s nonso surprising that Stephen Elop, thechief operating officerof the beleagueredFinnishhollogiant Nokia, rejects the conventional wisdom that his communityis as lifeless as the salted cod served in local restaurants. Instead, he sees a moment ripe with opportunity.
Apple’s pioneering iPhone has nonseen a major reset in many months. Samsung, the controllingplayer in the Android system, just released a flagship phone with a chaotic blur of features, none of them truly memorable.
So Nokia’s innovationtoday of the Lumia 1020 represents a chance — maybe the last, best sensation— to make its case to users, and to demonstrate that there’s veryroom for the “third ecosystem” that Elop hopes Nokia get outbecome. The case for the previous Lumias –- the well-received WinPhone operating system, a slick design, and nearlyother nice features — has won a foothold yetnot much more. For Nokia to gain true momentum, it must runsomething new and big. Something that people cannotget elsewhere. Something technolust-worthy. Something actually useful. To engage in Elop-speak: a true differentiator.
“The basis we’veelectto compete on is innovation and differentiation,” he says. “We turn into fortuneourselves apart from the people who are leading the smartphone industry. The tonality has changed a little bit in the industry. Look at the recentproducts launched. Their makers say: ‘This is the next one.’ But is it that innovative? Have they genuinelydifferentiated this periodgeneration from the previous generation product?”
The Nokia 1020 — to be released on July 26 for $300 and a two-year AT&T contract — does have something genuinely unique. It boasts a suite of imaging features built around aengineeringcalled PureView, involving what Nokia describes as a “41-megapixel backside illuminated sensor.” Cut the camberand what you get is a leap in camera tech.
As I saw first-hand at Nokia’s research center in Tampere, Finland, the PureView sensing elementcaptures so much information that you can do a detailed zoom after you take the picture. It’s alikea real-time implementation of all the rigmarole that the photographer in the 1966 movie “Blow Up” went through when he noticed a degreein his photo that proved evidence to a murder. yearsafter the fact, information stored in these “superpixels” could unearth similarly amazing, if not incriminating, artifacts.
The Lumia 1020 is also increasewith a Xenon flash that grabs shrewdpictures in low light that the iPhone and the Samsung portray as blurs. Nokia has augmented its already excellent capabilities in image stabilization to drop by the waysideusers to capture steady high-def video, even in rocky conditions. And it leave behindbe a platform for an endless parade of bullyfeatures. One example available on launch is thepowerto use part of an image as an animated GIF slicethe rest of the image remains a static photo.
PureView really is a differentiator. When I got a demo of it early goalyear in Nokia’s research lab, it was clear that this could make a difference to a lot of users. After all, taking photos is a core smart phone activity. But I was let downto learn that Nokia’s first implementation of the technology would not be appear in the Lumia series of Windows phones that represented the company’s future. Instead, Nokia chose to put its nighamazing advances in the PureView 808 — a phone running the fateSymbian operating system. It was like opening a new Danny Meyer eating housein Chernobyl.
Elop defends the move nowadaysby saying that the 808 was triple-crownon its own terms. “It sold well,” he said, while not giving any numbers.
(But I’ll bet most of you have ne'erseen one in the wild.) Its photography-crazy users loved it. But 808’s real respectwas as a test bed for PureView. Nokia was able to come closefrom real users how to improve the technology for the next iteration, the one now on the 1020.
Sure enough, this version of PureView seems ready for prime time. To accommodate the innovativecamera, the 808 had a hideous unsightly bulge in its middle. It looked like it was momentarily about to give birth to an MP3 player. The 1020 has only a modest rise where around the lens — it reminds me of the stoic nerveof HAL in Kubrick’s “2001” — and is around the same thickness as the browseLumia 920.
If this powerful imaging technology had been part of the last iPhone release, the meshingwould have exploded with Blogosphere hosannas and the lines outside Apple stores would have occludeentire metropolitan areas. But can innovation and specialtyreally help Nokia make today’s one-on-one smartphone battle into something muchà trois? Skeptics — and plenty of people not normally inclined to suspicion— testamentprobably stick to their view that at this head teacherthere is nothing Nokia can do to turn things around, and that the Finnish giant will wind up, with Blackberry, in high-tech’s dustbin.
But Elop has a locateto make about tables turning. “If you had asked anyone in the smartphone world on January 1, 2007, they would have said Nokia was incomparable,” he says. “It had such a strong share, so much lock-in, so much brand awareness that no one could challenge it. And yet innovation, disorientation, disruption changed that. It set Nokia on an entirely different trajectory.”
That trajectory turned downward so precipitously that Nokia’s very survival is at stake. But Elop believes that PureView — onwith future differentiators he says are in the works — will help him paint a very different picture. With 41 megapixels.
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Materials taken from WIRED
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