Harald Meyer's Symbian and Windows Phone camera applications are somewhat legendary, pushing the camera hardware of Nokia's phones to its limit, but here's something slightly different. Panorama Assistant takes photos under very controlled conditions, with the aim being to create 38MP photos that can be auto-stitched using the power of a desktop computer. If this doesn't sound very exciting, make sure you view the example 360 degree panoramas created on the Nokia 1020 and 808 PureView before you move on with your day!

From the description on the Nokia Store:

Panorama Assistant helps you to create great high resolution photo panoramas by using sensors to perfectly align each shot. It is also possible to calculate panorama rotations or use the app as an attachment for external (e.g. DSLR) cameras.

NOTE: Panorama Assistant does not stitch panoramas but it assists in shooting perfect source images for panoramas which can then be fused into high resolution panoramas using your favorite software!

You get the idea, then. Using the full resolution (if you so choose) of the Nokia PureView sensors, the utility makes it as easy as possible to create stunning panoramas, including wrap-around, 360 versions.

Via the PureView Club, check out this example, shot on the Lumia 1020. Just click the image and use the on-screen interface to rotate through 36 degrees - you'll be impressed!

This panorama shows the church in Maria Anzbach, Lower Austria. The panorama was captured with a Nokia Lumia 1020 (Windows Phone 8) with 38 MP (4:3) resolution. The light conditions were very bad which causes plenty of noise.

There are more examples of the utility at work here. Try clicking on this extra example image below:

This more traditional panorama shows the Reschensee (South Tyrol) captured with a Nokia 808 PureView (Symbian).

Note again that the actual stitching together of the images needs to happen on the desktop, as Harald explained to the PureView Club:

I do not provide software for this, but there are plenty of excellent tools available.

Free:
- Hugin
- ICE
Commercial:
- Autopano
- PanoTools, Photoshop, and many more.

The stitching process takes several tenths of seconds (up to minutes) on an Intel Core i7 8-core CPU and uses all 24GB of my machine’s RAM. So, it’s still a bit too much for mobile devices :).

- Which software did you use to stitch these shots?
I used Autopano and Microsoft ICE for the final panoramas. I also experimented with the panorama function built into Photoshop, and some other tools.

Here are some screens of Panorama Assistant in action on the two Nokia platforms:

Composing the panorama in the viewfinder on Symbian...

Setting it all up, one photo per second, with the overview always shown, so that you can plan a full 360 degrees better.

Picking a resolution to shoot each 'frame' at on the Nokia 808, right to the very limit of the 41MP sensor!!

Plenty more to fiddle with, plus named presets, in case you find several sets of settings that you really find useful.

Starting to take the panorama again, this time on the Nokia Lumia 1020, on Windows Phone...

Plenty to tweak here on Windows Phone too...

Assuming you're as impressed as me and that you want to get started creating mega-high-resolution panoramas on your phone, see these 'buy' links:

Symbian - £3 in the Nokia Store

Windows Phone - £2.29 in the Windows Phone Store