Slashdot Mirror
What's Happened In Mobile Over the Past 10 Years
andylim writes "recombu.com has an article examining what's happened in mobile over the past ten years, including BlackBerry launching its first smart phone in 2002, Motorola launching the Razr in 2004 and Apple launching the iPhone in 2007. As a commenter points out, the first camera phone (Sharp J-SH04), which was released in 2000, featured a 110,000-pixel (0.11MP) CMOS image sensor, and a 256-colour (8 bit) display."
Wow. Or:
Awesome. Just awesome. If you think there's more depth than this, there's not. That is the sum total of the analysis of those two years.
Oddly enough, the "bazillion-pixel camera" still takes crappy, "cell phone"-quality pictures.
hey designers the flip phone is so last century. The brick format is far superior, allowing larger screen size, larger batteries, and larger buttons. not to mention the abaility to push a button to accept a call, not to have to use both hands too open the damned thing.
flip phone suffer from breakage, and weak points in their overall designs(hinges can break) As much as I like retro old school toys please stop making them.
Not everyone likes the same things. I have owned several of each style and i always seem to fall back to brick phones.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
This deserves a mention, the legendary Nokia 6310i still has a thriving refurb market to this day. That thing is probably the highest quality mainstream phone ever made. http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/12/20/nokia_breakthrough_phone/
3G (UMTS) turned out to be a bit of a disappointment with the required cell density there are only a few 3G-only networks in densely populated places like South Korea, 2G GSM is likely to stay around well into the LTE era.
Satellite phone networks have also come a long way since the initial bankruptcies and unreliable services. There are now at least 4 Geosynchronous orbit satellite phone networks with handheld phones and the two LEO networks that went bankrupt both recovered and are planning to launch new satellites. The phones themselves also not half the size they used to be.
They missed the most important event of the year: launch of Nokia N900.
Whenever mobile phones are mentioned on Slashdot, something akin to the following comment will inevitably appear:
'All I want is a phone that makes calls.'
I've never quite got my head around a tech site like Slashdot, where the demographic is almost certainly interested in new technology having such a negative response to technological advances in what our phones can do. You rarely [never?] hear this with other technology on this site:
'I wish Windows 7 had less features. All I want is the ability to write a letter'
'This 4Ghz Core 2 Due Hyperfighting Special Edition is too fast for me. I want a 68030 at 25Mhz'... instead we get 'Imagine a Beowulf cluster of...'
Is it because the non-techie crowd have embraced mobile tech, in some instances more than us (given that some teenagers seem to text more than they speak) and we've been out done? Are the non-techies better at mobile tech than us?
(Yes, I know that Slashdot doesn't speak with one voice, but I bet the comment appears somewhere in this article).
Well, what can you expect with a camera with a single fixed aperture and speed? Almost every cell phone camera out there is f/2.8, although if you are (un)lucky, you might get one with f/5.6. Whatever the aperture is, however, is what you are stuck with, for the most part (unless you are a super-wiz hardware hacker and can replace most of the camera...).
The second factor in determining image quality is shutter speed, but since in this day and age, there is no physical shutter, "shutter speed" refers to how long the image sensor senses for image data; 1/400 shutter speed on a cell phone means that, actually, the sensor is only "looking" at the world for 1/400 of a second. While this is quite similar to a real camera, the fact that the sensor is "always exposed" means that it is always at odds with the world, in terms of lighting (being left camera-side up on a sunny day is not good for the phone's camera at all)
So yes, megapixels don't mean shit. A decent camera with an adjustable aperture and shutter speed (possibly even a real shutter) makes for a better picture.
And most countries, particularly much of the European ones, have the advantage of having higher population density and smaller area. Even in countries like Albania (which I doubt has much for any connectivity) getting the whole country covered with modern data cellular would be much easier.
Worth mentioning is that the countries in Europe furthest ahead in cellular technology, the Scandinavian countries, have very low population density even when compared to the US. And still they have coverage in pretty much all of the country. (Including many remote mountainous regions)
- These characters were randomly selected.
...is not quality, but immediacy.
I don't always have my camera on me, but I ALWAYS have my phone. The ability to grab a quick snapshot or video clip when something unexpected happens is priceless.
And the further ability to get that shot out on the network, before it can be censored... I've never had to rely on that, but it has done great things for other people.
And while it will never compete with a SLR bodied, pro camera, I've been pleasantly surprised by just how good a RAZR V9 can be. "Cell phone quality" need not mean "horrific".
And it works through the daysight on a TLAV 1m turret. That has proven useful.
DG
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