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Cell Phones Becoming Profitless
saccade.com writes "EE Times has a fascinating article
on how electronics companies are being sucked into a profitless
spiral by the cell phone market. More and more of the small consumer
gadgets are being folded into the phone: camera, music player,
PDA, GPS, etc. So the market for non-phone gadgets is slowly
going away as the phone picks up more functions. However, consumers
don't buy most phones; they are given away (or sold very cheap)
by the service providers as hooks to get people to sign up for
mobile service. So the service providers are demanding (and getting)
rock-bottom prices for fancy phones they can give away, and the
micro chip companies are forced into brutal competition for a
market that is shrinking into a single commodity gadget, the
phone."
SprintPCS does not charge you for the amount of data used. It's a flat $15/month for Vision, which gets you unlimited internet at about 10-15K/sec download speeds. Storage isn't an issue on my Treo 600. The built in memory can handle 300+ photos, and I have unlimited storage on Sprint's picture servers. The couple of SprintPCS Picture phones I've had the pleasure of using could save 20-40 photos internally, but of course there's unlimited storage when you upload there too. But yeah, the camera is crap compared to a real digicam. When I want to take photographs, I bring along my 5mp Minolta Dimage 7HI. When I just need to take a picture of something interresting and get it to anyone I want quickly, a cell-phone cam is very handy.
Unless, of course, someone like Canon start making those integrated cameras which come with the phones.
It doesn't matter who makes it. There are physical limitations of optics at work here. Correcting for aberrations takes a lot of glass, and glass isn't particularly light. There are currently limitations in the sensors such that larger sensors give better quality than smaller sensors. This will probably always be true to some degree or another (large format film camera give better results than 35mm, but for most of the market, who cares?). Sure, phone cams could potentially someday be enough for a lot of people, but they will NEVER take over the camera market as a whole. Just imagine holding a phone w/ attached 5 pound telephoto lens up to your ear.
Erie County (and possibly all of NYS, I'm not sure) has laws prohibiting the use of phones while driving... unless you have a handsfree set.
So, you are not allowed to hold on to a cell phone while driving because it is dangerous, but, these, evidentially, are not:
- smoke
- chow down on that big mac
- fumble with the radio
- read the newspaper
- tend to a crying child in the back seat
- apply makeup or shave (hopefully, the correct conjunction is "or")
That's why I hate cell phone driving laws - either target ALL driving distractions or target none of them.
It would be the same thing as having "assault with a knife", "assault with a bat", and "assault with a lead pipe" laws instead of "assault with a deadly weapon".
The only studies that I have seen quoted that supported cell-phone laws were ones that asked "Was a cell-phone in use during the accident?" not "What driving distractions were present during the accident?" Those are two completely different questions.
The studies that I have seen that list out all driving distractions clearly show things other than cell-phones are leading factors - I think "tuning radio" and "smoking" were the top two.
After I posted, I did a quick search on google and found this:
Driving distractions:
Outside person, object or event: 29.4%
Adjusting radio/cassette/CD: 11.4%.
Other occupant: 10.9%.
Moving object in vehicle: 4.3%
Other device/object: 2.9%
Adjusting vehicle controls: 2.8%
Eating and/or drinking: 1.7%
Using/dialing cell phone: 1.5%
Smoking: 0.9 %
Other distractions: 25.6%
Unknown: 8.6%
Source: University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center
My memory was a little off about the items (and order on the list).