It just appeared to me today that I could finally retire my Nokia 808 that I had since 2012 as I finally have a mobile phone now that can match its camera’s quality!
I’ve had a bit of a strange usage scenario for that phone. For the past 6 years I’ve been using it exclusively at home when I had to bulk photograph (i.e. ‘scan’) documents. Using a normal scanner for the purpose was far too slow, taking pictures of the document pages is much much faster. The Nokia 808 had an exceptional camera that made crisp and sharp pictures not only in daylight but also in somewhat degraded light conditions. Also, it was hard to get blurry pictures with that camera.
For years I didn’t have a smartphone that could rival that camera, until September last year when I bought a Samsung S9. The camera in the S9 now finally matches and even exceeds the Camera in my 7 year old Nokia 808 in speed, ability to take pictures of documents in low light conditions without blur and without large distortions at the border of documents.
There are ‘just’ 7 years between the 808 and the S9 but the differences between the two devices are just stunning. The Nokia 808 was one of, if not the last Symbian based phone. It was also the first Symbian phone that had a good touch screen, good touch support and was an impressive harbinger of what could have been if Nokia had continued on its path from Symbian to the Linux based Maemo. But that never happened.
Anyway, it’s time for the museum now so at this point, thank you very much to everyone at Nokia who designed such a great device at the time!