Its well documented that Nokia bet the house on its partnership with Microsoft in 2011. And the Lumia seems to have been well received, particularly in the US. However Windows Phones are still accounting for less than 5% of smartphone sales worldwide.

The Lumia 800 is the number one selling phone in Russia

Sales of S40 feature phones are up by 250%

Nokia are on the verge of bringing the first Windows Phone to China

Nokia have recently released their first 1GHz processor and are taking duel shots at the high-end and mid-range users – Andriod.

Nokia 808 Pure View on Symbian

Something of a shock announcement at Mobile Word Congress Nokia unveiled the new 41 megapixel camera, somewhat blowing the competition out the water. The BBC tech correspondents were extolling the brilliance of the pictures and video whilst questioning the choice of platform.

Symbian was all but dropped when Nokia announced the tie-up with Microsoft, they promised that Belle would be released and appeared to suggest that barring updates that would be the end of the Symbian platform. Either the message was poorly communicated or Nokia have changed their mind.

By the way, if you have not used it. Symbian Belle is a really good platform, had it been released in 2008/9 it would easily be a main player in the Smartphone market – but it wasnt.

One of the unique feature of the 41 megapixel Nokia 808 Pure View is the scalable nature of the images. The idea appears to be that the image will be intelligently sized according to the environment.

So the main features of the Nokia 808 Pure View:

4'' CBD screen and curved Gorilla Glass.

41 megapixel oversampling on a 1/1.2″ sensor

1080p video

Carl Zeiss lens

1.3 single-core processor

512MB RAM

Dolby technology for near CD quality sound recording

and apparently its huge! well designed but bulky.

Probably something of a one-trick-pony but what do you think?

By way of an update it should be acknowledged that its the PureView and not clearview, however it's surprising how many people search for “Nokia Clearview” so I'm not gong to change it!

The Pureview (not Clearview as stated in the article) has started to reduce in price, probably partly due to carrier subsidies not being taken up.

Allaboutsymbian continues to sing the praises of the Pureview and offer a useful tutorial here

How to: Use Scene modes in the Nokia 808 PureView camera

And meanwhile Techcrunch are reporting that the PureView technology is going to start appearing on windows phones: Nokia’s PureView Imaging To Appear On Windows Phone-Powered Lumias | TechCrunch

Along with a sneak preview of a windows 8 phone Hello Beautiful! Nokia’s Windows Phone 8 820/920 PureView Smartphones Leak | TechCrunch