I read an article in the New York Times last week about a convoy of people in the States who are eschewing Smartphones. It was written by journalist Teddy Wayne. And yes, instead of iPhones or Blackberries or watchamacallits, Wayne reports that many folks he's talked to recently have bought old-fashioned cell phones that do two simple things: make calls and receive them. And boy, are these people happy about it.

For a long time the idea of an old-fashioned cell phone has been sounding like a big relief to me. Because for an even longer time I've been feeling way too tied to an endless stream of pretty unimportant emails that appear on my Smartphone. I read these emails while I'm walking the dog. I read them while the pasta is boiling. I read them while my kids do their homework.

Why do I read them? I can't really answer that. Because none of these emails is ever that urgent. I mean sure, there are work-related book emails that come in and teaching emails that need answering, but I can get to those in due time when I'm at a desk and I've put aside the time to actually answer emails.

The sneaky thing that my Smartphones does is make me feel like every hour of every day is the absolutely most perfect time in the world to get my email. Except it's not. It's really time to make the red sauce. Or time to read Aidan a chapter from the Percy Jackson Series. Or time to throw a stick to the puppy.

So for months I've been feeling stuck -- I've got this snazzy Smartphone, and I should probably use it. And I've also been feeling a little worried -- what is this phone doing to my brain anyway? Why do I have this email compulsion?

Then I landed on the part in Wayne's piece about how Smartphones create a false need to constantly check our online life. Wayne cites a writer named Nicholas Carr, who wrote a book called "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains." Carr says Smartphones are making us better at multi-tasking but hurting our ability to sustain focus. Yikes.

And I'd been feeling scattered. I'd been feeling like all my thoughts were light. This could just be me. I can sadly be very light. So maybe it's not the Smartphone's fault, but Carr says that because of these phones, all of us "stop having opportunities to be alone with our thoughts, something that used to come naturally." Double yikes.

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.