Nokia’s resident camera expert jumps ship to Apple to avoid working for Microsoft

Apple has poached and landed Ari Partinen, the senior engineer behind the industry leading Nokia PureView camera. Yesterday Partinen announced that he is leaving Nokia on Twitter. We haven’t seen confirmation from Apple as yet though.

The Tweet is embedded below:

@bharadc23 Thank you for great discussions and feedback! (And it is the company you are thinking assuming you are thinking Apple) =)

— Ari Partinen (@Partinen) May 9, 2014

He later made it even clearer by adding that he will be working for Tim Cook from June.

Partinen has worked with the Finnish company since 2007, the year the original iPhone was announced. His role at Nokia required him to work on “image quality verification” along with other “fields of mobile photography”, with more current work including developing “image quality characterisation and tuning on camera module level.”

Referred to by Nokia as their “own camera expert” whilst stating that he has worked as Nokia’s “Lumia photography lead” on his Linkedln page, we expect that Apple’s new iPhone camera will surpass the already good 5s camera with the input of Partinen. The 41MP camera currently in Nokia’s Lumia 1020 has been universally considered as one of the best in the industry.

The Nokia Lumia 1020

Nokia’s handset division, now known as Microsoft Mobile, also completed its acquisition by Microsoft in late April, with the deal costing more than $7bn. With the acquisition, we are not surprised that key and senior Nokia staff has already starting to weigh up their options.

However, Partinen did not mention what job role he will hold at Apple, and Apple has yet to comment on the hiring either. But it cannot be more obvious that it will be something to do with his photo-tech expertise.