Every since Apple and Google started to comment aggressively about each others business and products, each earnings call or product launch is filled with some punches going around. So here is what Tim Cook (Apple COO) had to say about the iPad competitors at the Q1 earnings call which saw record profits/revenues for Apple.

Apple sold more than 7.3 million iPads last quarter and thats a huge margin over the 1 million Galaxy Tabs sold by Samsung. Android sure has failed to dent the tablets market.

Replying to a question on iPad competitors, Tim was prompt to point out that the Windows alternatives are big, bulky and work with a stylus or keyboard which does little to pelase the customers. But a bulk of his comments then moved to Android, starting with the fact that Google itself says that the OS is not ready for tablets. Pointing out the 7″ tablets as an oversized smartphone, which is far from the ‘real tablet experience’. “If you do a side-by-side with an iPad, you’ll pick an iPad.”

Tim also took shots at Honeycomb, calling it the ‘next generation, which we saw at CES’. He pointed out that Honeycomb isn’t shipping yet, nor are there any dates announced. He actually called it ‘vapor’, also citing lack of performance specs. He ended his iPad competition reply with ‘very confident entering into a fight with anyone’.

No, that’s not a typo. I did not mean to type 14 megapixels in that headline there. It indeed is 41 (forty one) megapixels. Anyway, let me inform you all what this is all about. At the on going Mobile World Congress at Barcelona, Spain, Nokia has made one of the most outrageous announcements ever seen in the mobile industry. Perhaps this might turn out to be the most significant advancement in mobile imaging technology since 2002 when the first of the cameraphones started rolling out.

Lest I go on talking gibberish about this, let me talk about the new launch in detail. We are talking about the Nokia 808 PureView – a quite unassuming looking smartphone that runs the “dead” Symbian OS – albeit the renamed, sexed up version of the same called Belle.

Video features of the Nokia 808
The Nokia 808 PureView smartphone not only captures stunning still-pictures, it also includes Full HD 1080p video recording at 30fps with 4X lossless zoom. When recording 720p HD videos, you can use up to 6x lossless zoom. In addition, video autofocus was an area that needed to be dramatically improved. Because of the much larger image sensor of the Nokia 808 PureView, the optics give you a relatively shallow depth of field. What’s more, oversampling techniques in video are used to achieve a holy grail of low visual noise with extremely high levels of detail. As a result, the autofocus system for the Nokia 808 is more precise and sensitive. 
Now if you are wondering how Nokia managed to do this seemingly impossible task, well, let us tell you that in reality, the phone makes use of some very smart (like really smart) “over-sampling” techniques that runs a magic wand on the pixels – grouping seven of them together which go on to become a super-pixel. The phone also gets the ability to film full HD videos with 4x zoom and that too, lossless. If you choose to record in 720p, you can zoom without any loss up to 6x! In the still image mode, you can zoom 3x times! The 808 also becomes the first Nokia handset to feature high-definition audio recording which the company claims can produce CD quality sounds. If that was not all, it features Dolby Digital Plus too.