From the interview, conducted after the Microsoft sale:
The news from Nokia at the beginning of this month raised a lot of questions from our readers. In particular, there has been a great deal of interest in what the news will mean for Nokia’s imaging team, and of course the imaging capabilities of Nokia phones. After all, Nokia has an incredible history of camera phones, and long may it continue.We recently had the chance to catch up with Samuli Hänninen, vice president of software program management for Nokia’s Smart Devices business, who gave us his insights about what this all means. Overall, you can expect to see changes – for the better...
...What does the Nokia/Microsoft announcement from Sept. 3 mean to you and the work of your team?
Samuli: We’ve been working closely with Microsoft over the past years and continue to do so.
Specifically, when we worked on the imaging capabilities on the Nokia Lumia 1020, close collaboration with them was super important. In order to ship on time, both parties stayed up for nights.
But I have to say that although our working relationship with Microsoft was very close and unique in many ways, we were part of different companies, which obviously set some rules for engagement and prevented us from sharing everything. Now we are looking forward to what we can achieve when we will be part of Microsoft and can be truly open. We are looking forward to the amazing stuff we can build together!
This backs up what we've heard from sources inside Nokia - that applications like Nokia Pro Camera and hardware like the Lumia 1020's camera module could have been integrated better into Windows Phone if these 'rules of engagement' hadn't been in the way. Qualifying 'better' is tricky, but a faster startup of the Pro Camera application is pretty much a given.
Maybe, like Apple, Microsoft can produce a faster and slicker user experience when it owns both the OS and hardware facilities?
...What will happen to PureView?
Samuli: PureView stands for the best imaging experiences on our devices and we will continue to innovate in this area. The Nokia Lumia 720 was a great example of us bringing a stunning camera to market with our widest aperture to date, but it didn’t carry the PureView name. The most important thing is what we do, not what it is called, although we like PureView a lot.
It sounds as if the PureView name might be going away, then. Some would argue that it had already been confused as a brand already, with the OIS-equipped 920 being labelled as being "PureView". With the launch of the 1020 and with hindsight, it would have been better to reserve "PureView" for the 41MP-sensored computional photography devices. Not that it matters too much in the long run, it's just a label, and a slightly confusing one at that.
Although it sounds as if the Nokia imaging guys haven't heard anything definite yet, perhaps look out for Microsoft Lumias next year with similar high tech camera units, but without explicit 'PureView' branding.
So is the picture going to be worth more than 1,000 words?
Samuli: We want people to capture memories, but sometimes it is hard to understand the memory without knowing the context of the situation. For instance, what was the news of the day, the weather, who was there at the time the picture was taken?
When you press the camera button on the screen, it captures the light from a camera sensor. But that sensor can also capture the location, or whatever metadata is available from the place you are in, or from the Internet. There is something special about this place or time that is relevant to the situation.
We want to make the picture equal a million words! It is not just a picture, it is your memory.
Interesting - I wonder whether such information can be contained within standard EXIF data fields or whether an extra (meta)data file will have to accompany each image. Certainly there's potential here for photograph cataloguing to become smarter. We've already seen something along these lines in Google+'s handling of photos from the Android world, I'm guessing that Microsoft and Nokia's ideas will run along similar lines.
You can read the full interview here.