Countdown to nothing - PureView not launching today, says Nokia

The clock was set to 1 minute, the hours field still spouted digits that were scrolling at super speed, and the seconds counted down – 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 .. you get the picture. At the stroke of midnight, right on cue, the page reloaded and came right back to the introduction page. The image of those sunglasses animatedly appeared on the screen, once again and the question we had already answered umpteen times – ‘Where do you think these sunglasses are lying?’ stared mockingly at us.

So after tons of speculation, changes and leaks in the price, and even a countdown timer, it turns out that Nokia had us all fooled. We stayed up just to find out what the countdown clock on the nokiapureview.in website would open up to and here’s the big surprise, are you ready for it… Nokia finally announced… absolutely nothing!

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

We selected the right answer; we had been through this before, so it was no contest. The page stuttered for a moment, we saw a flash of numbers and then with a swivel of animation and white on black with hexagonal lines, the page opened, and we were right back to the introduction once again.

Nothing, but a big zero…

Clearly there has been some disconnect about the launch of this device. Nokia already told us that the PureView 808 launch was inevitable, but not today. We were also informed by reliable sources that the handset would make its Indian debut within the next few weeks with no specific date mentioned.

This does lead to a set of very intriguing questions – Firstly, why has there been so much ado about this specific handset in terms of pricing? It seems to be a first time scenario where the web is clearly not in sync with information, as no one seems to have the right information yet. Could the handset be priced at Rs. 29,999 or Rs. 32,999?

Question number two – Who is then responsible for the pureview.in website with the weird countdown clock that was counting down to nothing? Was this all a publicity stunt for the handset to generate hype? Was Nokia behind it or some random third party? We’re not sure… yet. All we know for sure now is that the PureView 808 will not be launching today.

Stay tuned for more on the mystery of the PureView countdown clock, as we try and unravel the clues and try and get details directly from the source.