Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has hired Nokia Corporation (NYSE:NOK) (BIT:NOK1V) (HEL:NOK1V)’s Lumia Photography Lead Ari Partinen. Mr. Partinen confirmed the reports in a tweet, saying that Friday was his last working day at the Finnish company. He will move to Cupertino in June. Nokia last month completed the sale of its handset business to Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT). So, its key staff are considering their options.
Apple snaps an engineer who has worked on PureView
According to his LinkedIn profile, Partinen worked as the Lumia Photography Lead. He has worked extensively in the fields of image quality verification, mobile photography, verification upstreaming, supplier collaboration and third-party collaboration. One of the most important things he has worked on is Nokia Corporation (NYSE:NOK) (BIT:NOK1V) (HEL:NOK1V)’s PureView camera technology. The 41MP PureView in Lumia 1020 is considered the best quality smartphone camera. PureView shrinks a very large image into a smaller, high-quality one.
Ari Partinen graduated from the Helsinki University of Technology, and joined Nokia Corporation (NYSE:NOK) (BIT:NOK1V) (HEL:NOK1V) in 2007 as image quality engineer. His decision to join Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) rather than Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) at this juncture isn’t a good sign for the Redmond-based company. Apple’s iPhone 5S camera is already considered pretty good, the tech giant might be looking for more.
What is Apple planning for its smartphone camera?
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has hired many medical and healthcare experts in the past few months to work on its iWatch, which is anticipated to have health and fitness features. But hiring a photography expert who has worked on one of the best smartphone cameras signals that the company isn’t taking the iPhone camera lightly. While its rivals have increased pixels in their smartphone camera, Apple has kept the iPhone camera at 8MP so far. Even the upcoming iPhone 6 is speculated to sport the same 8MP camera, though it is likely to have optical image stabilization feature.
It’s been a quite busy month for Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL). It recently purchased the power-efficient LED company LuxVue, which could help improve the iPhone battery life. And rumors have surfaced that it is planning to buy Beats Electronics for a whopping $3.2 billion, which could be its biggest acquisition ever, if the deal goes through.
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) shares fell 0.66% to $584.11 at 10:26 AM EDT on Friday.
