Comment: The launch of the Nokia 1020

Nokia announced its latest flagship smartphone, the Lumia 1020, today in a special event held in New York. This smartphone is not just another evolutionary upgrade - it is packed with some revolutionary technologies, most of which are related to camera and computational imaging.

Lumia 1020 comes with a 41-megapixels sensor, a technology previously embedded into Nokia's PureView 808. However, the Lumia 1020 has been enhanced with a number of additional features such as Optical Image Stabilisation using floating lens technology, colour sharpness, Xenon Flash instead of LED flash, visual setting, and open camera API for advanced computational imaging. It is impressive to see all this sophisticated hardware packed into such a beautiful and compact industrial design.

These characteristics will no doubt put the bar far too high for those of Nokia's competitors that are looking to differentiate on the camera quality. So far, there are a couple that will soon be introducing 20MP in their future products, but most use 8MP sensors and plan to upgrade to 12MP by the end of the year.

What marketing message should Nokia send?

However, it remains to be seen how the device will behave in terms of power consumption and sensor heating effect, processing such high-quality images requires advanced processing hardware.

From a marketing perspective, camera phones with quality close to SLR will attract a big audience, certainly those of us who want a two-in-one device of a good smartphone with a good camera. The Lumia 1020 enables the capture of SLR-quality images in a phone form factor, which is a very good offer as it enables a significant cost saving while dramatically improving the overall camera experience.

The question here is how to reach out to this audience and what marketing message should Nokia send? This is the question the Finnish company and its partners among the operators need to tackle.