Nokia acquires developers and IP from Scalado

Recently, Finnish phone company Nokia announced the completion of acquisition of technologies, developers and intellectual property from Scalado. The precise details of the deal is a secret and will probably remain a secret until the acquired technology is seen in Nokia’s future products.

Nokia’s Samuli Hanninen, VP, software program management, was able to share his thoughts on where the Espoo-based company plans to take camera phones next. “We think that imaging is about to go through another major revolution,” Hanninen told Nokia Conversations.

“Nokia has always been a leader in camera phone technology, from its first camera phone, the Nokia 7650 in 2002, to the first autofocus 12-megapixel camera phone with the Nokia N8, to the huge step forward that came with PureView technology, its unique oversampling and lossless zoom.” He goes on to say, “But if you think about it, 100 years ago the early pioneers such as Kodak defined how pictures are taken. A lot has changed in terms of technology, but the basic premise has stayed the same. It has just been about doing the same thing in different ways.”

Nokia joining forces with Scalado

“We’re now at the point where things can change radically. It’s our ambition that phones will be able to capture emotions and distill memories to a far greater extent than they do today,” he says. “One example is the way phones can enrich photos with contextual data. It can know the who, what, where and when behind every picture and use that intelligently. My grandmother used to write notes on the back of the photos in her album – where they were and when; who was there and what they were doing. The power of smartphones can build that into the pictures themselves and offer new ways to relive your memories.”

Hanninen talked about ‘recapturing moments’. “Your photos can contain so much information that you can go back and make new pictures that are completely different, in non-destructive ways - maybe focused on the sunset that was behind your girlfriend’s shoulder in the original.”

The developers from Scalado will be forming a new centre for imaging in Lund, Sweden, alongside the developers based in Nokia’s Tampere and Espoo imaging teams who came up with PureView. The Lund team will focus on software to complement the hardware from the Finnish developers.

Nokia’s PureView 808 was launched in India in June for Rs. 33,899. For those interested, here are the specs  the PureView 808:

• 4.0-inch AMOLED ClearBlack display with a 360 x 640 pixel resolution
• 3G, EDGE/GPRS, Wi-Fi
• GPS with A-GPS support
• Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP, USB 2.0
• 41 megapixel camera with Xenon flash, 1080p@30fps video recording
• Stereo FM radio with RDS
• 16GB internal storage memory expandable up to 32GB via microSD card
• 3.5mm handsfree socket