Depending on how you look at this story, you'll either be excited or disappointed. PocketNow has pulled out another big Nokia leak in the form of the press shot you see above. Say hello to the Nokia Lumia 601, a handset that was leaked earlier this week in a Nokia developer commercial that was replaced with an edited version later. There wasn't much more information included in their article, but looking at the photo the 601 is clearly sporting a 8-megapixel camera with f/2.8 lens and what looks like a dual LED flash. If this is true, the 601 would become the lowest phone in Nokia's ranks to sport such a high-end camera, replacing the spot once held by the Nokia 701.
We also mistakenly believed this device to be the Nokia Ace, a phone rumored to have a 4.3" display, an 8-megapixel Carl Zeiss camera, and support for AT&T's new 4G LTE network. How could we have confused the specs-powerhouse of the Ace with a 600-series handset? To be frank, this handset looks like a premium handset -- in fact we think it's too nice to be even lower down the food chain than the conservative Lumia 710.
However, The Nokia Blog raises a very good point about that 8-megapixel camera. The 601 appears to share the same exact lens with the Symbian Anna-powered Nokia C7 (and its successor with Symbian Belle, the aforementioned 701) which would mean the phone is going to make due with an EDoF lens (Extended Depth of Field). EDoF lenses are incapable of autofocusing unlike most smartphone cameras and typically are found in lower-end handsets, but Nokia's EDoF lenses are typically of nice quality (All About Symbian has a great read on why Nokia uses EDoF lenses which we highly recommend you check out).
At the end of the day, can we confidently say this handset is for real? Not really but since Nokia went out of their way to remove it from that developer commercial, we still believe it could be seeing the light of day sooner rather than later.
Source: PocketNow, The Nokia Blog
