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Megapixel Cameraphones Compared
prostoalex writes "MobileBurn published a 'horribly un-scientific' test of three megapixel cameraphones. The contenders are the Sony Ericsson S700i, the Siemens S65, and the Motorola V710." Sadly, none of the phones seem to be able to perfectly capture a mere school bus in image form.
Of course, it's only a phone, but it's a good tool aimed at taking both vocal and video notes.
I use mine to take VGA pics and I am very happy with their imperfections...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
The problem with cameraphones is largely the lenses. They suck.
For several reasons:
1) They have to be small (it's a phone, it has to be easily pocketable)
2) They have a very hard life compared with a "real" camera.
3) Most people now view mobile phones as disposable items, replacing them every year or so, so there's not a whole lot of point in spending a lot of money on a decent lens.
(Could this ever be the first RELEVANT first post on slashdot?)
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
seems to have excellent photo quality for a mobile phone. It has pretty much functions from normal digital camera that makes it very usefull. SE's S700i platform is the same from K700 phone but s700 supports memory sticks. You can read a very good review here:
Phone
Phone's camera
Fucking a fat girl is like riding a scooter... it's fun 'til someone sees you.
Why are they building a phone w/ a three megapixel digital camera, when I still can't get a decent basic cell, that's small and has a weeks worth of battery per charge.
Don't use your megapixel camera phone to take pictures of school busses. You'll get lynched.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
and most importantly
sigs, as if you care.
I think the most intriguing use of camera phones is for OCR. Of course to make it work you'd need WiFi or WiMax rather than regular wireless telephone protocols. But if you could stitch together a few shots per page and quickly upload them to your home computer form the library, well that would be interesting.
Cell phone companies (and I work for one of them) are desperately trying to make money out of their cellular phone. One of the huge market is teenagers because they tend to want to differentiate themselves and they are willing to pay for that new and cool ring tone or SMS feature, or game, or color and what not.
;) ), cameras, pictures, games, and what not.
I personally couldn't have imagined someone paying for a ring tone on his/her cell phone; and the ring tone business is apparently worth billions of dollars these days. Those who saw this coming were quite clever I guess, but isn't it sad that people are spending money on crappy MIDI stuff for their cell phone?
So cell phone companies pack their devices with close-to-useless features like MIDI player for polyphonic ring tones (many people at my work call it polymorphic 'cause that's what they remembered of C++
But seriously, don't you think the majority of people will use those extra features a few times only, mostly to show others how cool and different their new toy is and then they'll forget about them because they are what they are: useless for a cell phone.
I wonder how this confusion will end? The difference between your average PDA and a cell phone is what now? They both play MP3s, take pictures, are organizers, are wireless cell phones, support bluetooth, are WIFI enabled, can act as vibrators; but generally speaking, they do one thing hopefully right: your PDA is probably (hopefully) a better organizer than the organize feature on your cell phone; the rest is useless crap designed to differentiate the device on the market.
When we received our new cell phone at work, everyone, for about a week, was spending countless hours on ring tones, taking pictures, playing that stupid mini putt game, enabling Bluetooth and wandering around for another Bluetooth soul willing to answer, etc., etc.
Now; yeah sure everyone has his/her own "personal" ring tone differentiator, but the damn cell phone is used a cell phone, the extra features are now what they are: useless.
But does have:
- A prefix search of your contact list one button away from the home screen. Some phones hide this away, and it's the most important feature. Other phones I've seen have a substring search - if you hit 'C', you get every entry with a C in it, rather than moving to the ones starting with C. And this one lets you enter more than one letter in your search; some start a new search if you enter a second letter. Handy if you have lots of numbers.
- Several phone numbers for each entry: Home, Home2, Office, Office2, Mobile, Mobile2, Pager, Fax, Fax2, None. Handy; for a lot of people I have an apartment number, a parents' house, a cell phone, and an office number. My last phone only let me enter three numbers per contact, and I had to name one of those something completely inappropriate. (Calling the parents' house a "Fax" number or something.) I wish it let you customize the labels, but oh well. The only phones I've seen that do that are these huge Motorola things.
- A flip cover. Protects the display, provides longer battery life by allowing the display to shut off, and makes good UI sense - never worry about forgetting the key lock and dialing numbers from your pocket.
- A speakerphone. Handy if you have to call tech support and end up on hold forever.
- Analog service.
- Good battery life.
- Caller ID-based ring tones, so you can know who's calling right away. (And they're downloadable, I think.)
- A "recent calls" thing a button away. Hit send-send from the home and you call the last person in your dialed, received, or missed calls.
- An alarm clock. The only non-phone tool I use all the time. Handier than a true alarm clock because you can set it quickly with the numeric keypad. Plus the act of flipping open the phone and hitting the button is a little less reflexive than hitting a huge snooze button, so it's more likely to wake me up.
- A speed dial, one two or three digits. Either hold down the last one or hit send. I don't use it much, though - I can never remember which number is which.
It's a good phone and fits me well. LG really has the best UI. My only real complaints are:It has a few other features (schedule, voice memo, notepad, ez tip calc, full calculator, world clock) that I never use but someone else might find helpful. And a couple stupid "my pictures" / sounds / animations things. Also voice dialing.
I don't see any way to block numbers at the phone level, though. Sorry. Similarly, it'd be nice if a phone could have contact entries that don't show up in the main phonebook. I admit it, I've got a few phone numbers in there that I keep only to know I shouldn't answer the phone if they call. I want to see the name on the caller ID, but I don't want to have to scroll past it. I'm picky about the number of button presses to make a phone call. It has contact groups, but the main phonebook always shows all groups. You have to hit several more buttons to see just one.
A lot of people come out with comments like "I want a phone that's just a phone" or "I don't need/want these features when I can get better separate units that do the same thing". This is really silly.
I don't know what the American market is like, but here in the UK, I got a Nokia 7610 for 50GBP (that's less than $90) on a very reasonable contract (500 free minutes per month and other goodies for 25GBP / $40 pm).
Although I have a much better PDA (Palm Tungsten T3), and a much better digicam (Canon Powershot A80) and a much better MP3 player (iPod Mini), guess how much of the time I'm carrying all of these around with me? Practically ziltch. But, I do almost always have my phone with me, 24/7.
So, the times I've forgotten my camera, the megapixel camera on the phone is great for a quick and dirty picture of something interesting or important. When I don't have room for my PDA, the phone is great for recording a memo or checking my diary (I sync both with the same desktop PIM, and it mostly works). It's also cool that when I don't have time to pack the iPod, I can take a short journey and still listen to almost a whole album at 128kbps from the 64MB SD card.
The phone is a great phone by itself, with excellent contact management, call management, logging and other features. Since it was so cheap, these extras are essentially bonuses. It's also hardly bigger or heavier than a "normal" cellphone. It also has the trademark Nokia battery life of several days. This is quite sufficient even when on the road, especially since every third person you meet seems to have a universal Nokia charger stowed away somewhere.
I look forward to the day when I can put my PDA, iPod and camera in the drawer forever, and I think we might only be a few years shy of it. Until then, I will enjoy my phone and its extras, using the additional separate devices when I want better quality.
And thanks to my contract, I get a brand new smartphone every year.
Three points:
.3megapixel you can take useful pictures that may serve a purpose.
1. Cellphones come in different models, some with cameras, some without. Happily, the ones WITHOUT cameras are usually cheaper, which is great for those that don't want "extra stuff I will never use."
2. Cameras on a cellphone are extremely useful because it's WITH YOU all the time, and with relative ease you can send a picture from where you took a picture to an arbitrary email address. Even on the low-end
3. The last thing you do before you die is crap your pants.
My eyes ache from rolling to the back of my head whenever I click on a slashdot cellphone article, because it always goes down this road (and yes, this post is part of that).
People have already mentioned why camera phones aren't up to snuff. I have a diminutive Canon SD200 which I love. I wish I could find an equally good phone. Instead, all the phones with bluetooth seem to also have a camera built in and therefore suffer in size and weight. Not everyone wants a mediocre phone/camera/camcorder/mp3 player, and I don't think it's possible due to ergonomics to make something that does all of those well.
Can I get a phone that is just a phone please?
Not trivially, no. There are many reasons for this. First, "just a phone" is a term that is in flux. Certainly 15 years ago, that meant a device that was attached to a wall either directly or by a short cord, and converted your face-noise to analog signal on a copper wire.
So, what you're saying now is you want a wireless phone-like device. Then you say you want to block numbers... well that's not really a phone-like thing at all. Certainly not a phone-like thing when measured against what phones have done for the last 50 years!
You're asking for a new device. While your wish list is nice, to ignore the wish list of the vast majority of other customers would be neglegent on the part of the management of the cell phone manufacturers.
No I don't want a crappy digital camera on my phone.
And yet, the idea of camera phones has caught on like wildfire, and is one of the single most popular modifications to the basic cell phone since user-downloadable ring-tones. I'm not saying you're wrong not to want this, but to act as if the industry is going off half cocked and ignoring the customer is putting blinders on to who the customer really is.
No I don't want a crappy music player on my phone. No I don't want a crappy web browser on my phone.
Granted, implementations of these features have been lame to say the best.
What the world really IS waiting for is a decent, way to manage contacts. Now that phones are portable, we NEED a way to have our numbers move with us as trivially as that note-pad that we used to keep by the phone pre-cell. Replacing a phone should not be traumatic, but because of the proprietary formats involved it IS. You usually need a for-pay version of Outlook on Windows just to read the data from your phone. This makes no sense.
I WANT A PHONE THAT IS A PHONE. Jesus christ.
Once again, define phone.
Sadly, none of the phones seem to be able to perfectly capture a mere school bus in image form.
Man, that's a real drag. I can't tell you how often I need to capture a mere school bus in image form. Not going to buy one of these phones.