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.
They missed the most important event of the year: launch of Nokia N900.
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.