Jay, over at My Nokia Blog, has seized on some comparison photos shot in low light by contributor Vlado, taking the same low light scene with both the Nokia 808 PureView and Apple iPhone 5. While the latter is claimed to have a special low light oversampling mode, the crop below and photos provided here show that there's quite a gulf between this 'PureView'-lite and the real thing. Good thing Nokia went down the optical image stabilisation route instead for the Lumia 920, eh? - I don't think 808-style oversampling works that well with such a small sensor to start with!

From Jay's article:

The iPhone 5 is heralded by its biggest fans as having a much better camera than the predecessor, with evangelists claiming you can now take low light pictures that you could not before on an iPhone 4S.

It uses something that attempts to be like oversampling by combining pixels (though not precisely like the 808, and it can’t since the sensor and pixel starting point is not the same). Whilst it is known that the low light optimised Nokia Lumia 920 slaughters iPhone 5, the Nokia 808 PureView gives the iPhone 5 a good kicking too.

After the comparison pics on the weekend that oddly showed the older 4S in a more favourable light, Vlado shares these pictures that correlates more with what the rest of the blogosphere has shown us.

We really don’t need to label the photos. The worse one is the iPhone.

As I say, given that Nokia had constrained future devices like the Lumia 920 to use a 1/3" sensor, it's probably best that OIS was used instead of PureView phase 1-style oversampling, though my money's still on a combined OIS/PureView-1 device, with 1/2.3" 21 megapixel sensor mounted in an OIS unit for a camera phone in 2013. Anyone want to take that bet?(!)