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Samsung Unveils Windows Phone 8 Device and Android-Based Camera
MrSeb writes "Today Samsung joined Nikon in announcing an Android-powered camera. The Samsung Galaxy Camera weighs 305g, features a 16-megapixel CMOS sensor, 21x super zoom lens, a quad-core 1.4GHz SoC (probably Exynos 4), 8GB of internal storage, and runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. This compares with the Nikon S800c which also has a 16MP CMOS sensor, along with a 7x zoom f/2 lens and runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Since neither unit has shipped, we don't know anything yet about how good they are as cameras, but we do know that the companies are trying to regain some of the ground they've lost to smartphones by integrating sharing right into their cameras. For photographers, there are a couple of critical questions about these new models: First is whether these cameras will have enough additional functionality to justify the added cost and weight when most people already have a serviceable camera in their phone. Second, and more importantly, there is still a big question mark hanging over Nikon and Samsung's long-term intentions for Android. If Android cameras are just standard point-and-shoots with a smartphone OS bolted on for sharing, that'll be a wasted opportunity. It would have been easier to create a camera that instantly tethered to a smartphone instead, and let the phone do all the work. There is an exciting possibility, if Nikon and Samsung do this correctly and allow low-level access to the camera functions via Android, to really unleash the power of Android to enable new photographic solutions."
Samsung has also taken the wraps off the ATIV S, the first smartphone running Windows Phone 8. It has a 4.8" screen, NFC support, and a microSD card slot. Samsung plans to start shipping them in Q4.
So they deleted the phone button?
Goes to prove that successful companies always have a Plan B, or C, or D....
The loss to Apple and the $1 billion fine were damaging, as will the product ban be, but it’s good to see Samsung had Windows Phone and a non-phone Android device in their back-pocket. Plus let’s not forget their TV and home appliance businesses.
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Samsung figured what is one more phone to make with all the others. Especial when the OS provider will pay so much to have their OS run one of the cool kids.
It's be more interesting when they can do this with DSLRs.
I don't get it. Why delete the phone?
I've been waiting for someone to put a proper phone in a proper camera, but neither Nikon nor Samsung are doing it
Nokia 808 pureview looks like a much better idea, only it's on a dead end OS
...whether these cameras will have enough additional functionality to justify the added cost and weight when most people already have a serviceable camera in their phone...
Yeah, if you only want to take quick snapshots and you don't care about the quality, any phone camera will do. But even among phones, camera quality varies.
For a long time, I carried a Motorola Droid X with an 8 MP camera. I didn't buy it for the camera, but having the camera made me fall into the habit of taking pictures whenever I saw something interesting. (I'm a serious pedestrian living in a town with a lot of interesting architecture and views.) The results were pretty cool.
Then I had to replace the phone with a Motorola Triumph with a 5 MP camera. Picture quality suffered. Wouldn't have mattered so much to me if the previous camera hadn't introduced me to the joys of casual photography. When I have the time and money, I will certainly buy a more serious camera and take some classes.
Will that camera be Android-powered? The way the article goes at it (is there enough added functionality?) is exactly backwards. It assumes you live in an Android-powered world and are looking for the best way to integrate your picture-taking into it. For my part, I'll look at all low-end cameras, Android or not, and see which has the physical and electronic features that will work for me.
I suspect that Android is overkill for a dedicated camera and that one of those special purpose, nameless OSs that most cameras come with will suit me better. But I'm withholding judgment until the time comes.
So, you still need a phone for phoning, but now you get to play angry birds on your camera?
Can't they just keep the phone?
I think I rather give Apple a billion every year than make Windows phones.
They're losing ground to camera phones - so they apparently came to the conclusion the reason for that is the OS that's on some of those phones? They've completely (and obviously) missed the point.
#DeleteChrome
On the topic of the SD card for the ATIV S, is it going to still be non-removable? There was a bunch of tooth-gnashing here on Slashdot over that for WP7, but I suspect Microsoft doesn't figure the general public cares (or understands) it well enough to make them change it for WP8.
I just skimmed the article, and it doesn't even really say if the ATIV S has an SD slot, just that WP8 allows for one. If I were new here I might wonder how that got into the summary...
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
While the article was about an announcement, and thus pretty fluffy, why did souskill add the shit about wp8 from spamworld?
The camera comes equipped with WiFi, and 3G or 4G cellular optional. Nice. An app that allows direct uploading from the camera to flickr or dropbox will be a great feature, especially against those authority figures who would wish to delete your photos when they don't like you taking pictures in public areas.
Think of this - an Android based camera, that had way more RAM than a smart phone so that image editing applications had a lot of headroom to play with, and an additional SDK with extra hooks into the camera controls.
You could do apps with custom capture abilities (based on time interval, or accelerometer changes). You could do apps that could slide into the image pipeline to do corrections to the image based on camera movement.
It might provide enough reason for a person to buy a standalone camera again, as long as the quality was significantly higher than most phones and as I said you had extra abilities to integrate with the camera controls through an SDK.
I don't program Android apps at the moment but being able to program custom apps tailored for just a camera would probably be too interesting to resist.
They could even have a camera specific app store...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can't believe how terrible the mainstream coverage is of the current smartphone news. Why is no one analyzing the real technological battle being waged and the apparent winner, Qualcomm.
Half of the summaries of the announcement simply say that the Ativ S is "dual core," as opposed to I suppose "quad core." What does that mean? I instantly thought, are they using the Qualcomm processor, perhaps even the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4? But then I also knew that since it was a Windows Phone, there is quite the chance it has to be Qualcomm, the one maker Microsoft currently supports.
For this generation of phones, not only is Qualcomm making many of the baseband chips, certainly those for LTE multimode, but they're also successfully selling the entire SoC even in European markets? For Android, Samsung has already had to produce different phones same model Galaxy SIII, one for the US with Qualcomm processors, one elsewhere with its presumably preferred own ARM processor.
Articles such as http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2009/02/nokia-st-ericsson-qualcomm-broadcombye-bye-texas-instrument-and-hello-to-the-new-nokia/ claim that in the previous generation "Nokia was designing the core chipset and letting Texas Instruments finish the integration and physically produce the chips: Nokia has been mastering the whole hardware IP of its phones, and has not been relying on generic chipsets for the vast majority of its production, with all the margins this implies ..." Qualcomm and Nokia settled their lawsuit in July 2008, but look what has happened since then. Now it is Nokia that for the Lumias and presumably for their next generation Windows Phones are having to rely on Qualcomm processors and chipsets.
The mainstream press for some reason has missed the single biggest IP story the past decade, one that has destroyed at least one major company Nokia and has established another Qualcomm as a re-emerging hegemon on a world-wide scale. It should be obvious that if one tries to predict the future, the Chinese at least are not likely to meekly accept a Qualcomm monopoly without somehow getting their own capacity to export similar technology, which then leads one to read about China's TD-LTE ongoing effort, and other companies trying to partner with the Chinese in one last stand against Qualcomm.
There's a lot more going on in mobile IP struggles than what is happening with a certain company with a fruit in its name.
They're losing ground to camera phones - so they apparently came to the conclusion the reason for that is the OS that's on some of those phones?
A different take is that they realized people like to take photos with smartphones because of the large choice ot applications you have to take the photos. Some apps do filters, some do panoramics, some do selective coloring, etc.
When you can do all that right as you are taking an image, who wants a boring old camera where you do that later?
I think it's about as good idea as can be had to revive the concept of a separate compact camera, which otherwise will be totally subsumed by smartphones in short order.
What would be really interesting, is a DSLR that you could program in this way... You could even have the normal camera control software just as one app, but allow people to write others. As long as other apps could take input from all controls on the camera you could get some great alternate takes on control software for a DSLR.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I really expect some kind of Android derivative desktop OS to be popular by 2020.
btw am I the only one who would like to see OSS repos become common on Android? Play store is all fine and good, but I prefer to run software where I can see the source.
expandfairuse.org
Why? I don't really understand why people want their cameras to be general purpose computers to start with.
It's not that they necessarily want the cameras to be computers. It's that they want a different specialized device than the manufacturer chose.
Haven't you ever looked at a camera menu and thought, this is horrible, I could do better? Potentially with an Android based camera you could totally replace the native menu structure with your own.
The key would be that you have to be able to get input from all camera controls (every wheel, button and slider) in any app. Then you could have a variety of applications to fully dedicate the camera to a specialized task.
This would really bring a lot of excitement back into DSLR's (or mirrorless cameras, don't want to leave them out) in a market that is increasingly tantalized by the huge number of ways they can make use of a camera on a smartphone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It has really gone under the radar that Qualcomm is now kind of the deFacto provider of cell communications chips, Apple uses them also.
I was going to post before that even though the summary didn't state it explicitly, it looks like the new WP8 phone will support LTE because of the Qualcomm chip it uses. But you have provided a more thought-provoking context around that fact...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Days after being bitch-slapped by the largest (thus best) company in the world, these retards have the gall to announce new smartphones, when they should be making a b-line out of the industry already.
I think we should pressure North Korea to invade the south for stepping on good, decent American intellectual property.
This site has strayed far from "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters". The problem seems to be a change of direction from within, with external forces at work too. Pro-MS and anti-Apple seem to be the bulk of the agenda. It feels like an invasion of "free speech".
Submissions and moderation are corrupted. There's censorship and it feels like troll-farms have unleashed new crops. There's not just spamminess but junk-science too.
But back on topic, I think those new Windows 8 phones look really spiffy. With the blue background I never feel far from the comfort of basking in familiar blue-screen pleasure.
When I first read about the Nikon Android camera, I was interested to see what it could do.
Then, I read it was shipping with 2.3. That seems crazy if you are hoping to get advanced application support from Android developers.
Samsung is doing this right, shipping the most recent Android and all of the API improvements that entails. In a camera where the whole point of being is to run custom applications, why would Nikon hamstring themselves against potential competition? If I were looking to write an app targeting a camera specifically I would totally ignore the Nikon.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Looking through the apps on the screen, you've got (in order of appearance):
Usability FAIL. It looks like you've got two competing app stores on your camera (Google's and Samsung's), and how are you going to find your files (is it in my files? gallery? dropbox? Oh, wait, maybe they're in camera?)? It never ceases to amaze me that huge corporations spend all this money developing and releasing these products and it's like no one ever bothered to pick it up and try to use it first. They work so hard to copy Apple, and they can't even do that properly.
I have a Samsung home theater system with an "iPod Dock" that disables the iPod interface and starts playing the first song on the device in alphabetical order. To choose another song, you have to hit the >> button, wait two seconds for it to load and then a few more seconds to figure out if it's something you want to listen to. With over 2,000 songs, it takes about 15 minutes to find a song on-demand.
I have a Samsung TV that doesn't come with a printed manual. Users are expected to read it on the TV, yet the manual includes a troubleshooting section devoted to "The TV will not turn on." If you can't get the TV to turn on, you can't read the manual. I guess they expect you'll go back to the store and read the manual on the floor model to get your TV to turn on. Or you figure out that they have a very nice PDF file on their Web site.
The Frankencamera might give you an idea what this would be good for, especially this video.
Delete the cellular voice call button from a smartphone and you have a PDA. It worked for Palm and Microsoft before the rise of smartphones, and it worked for Apple with the iPod touch.
Why delete the phone?
Because not everyone wants to have to pay hundreds of dollars per year for yet another phone line.
I love this variation on the "Goodbye Cruel World" troll post.
The old grey lady ain't what she used to be, ain't what she used to be.
You are welcome on my lawn.
the camera is white with rounded corners...
Hell patent system.
> I've been waiting for someone to put a proper phone in a proper camera,
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/29/android-phone-lumix-camera-panasonics-lumix-phone-101p-for-japan/
No sane person would buy a WP (phone) anyway.
Unless they have customers who are clamoring for a Windows Phone port of a given application.
Yes, but automatic upload means that your credentials are stored on the camera... so if instead of destroying it they grab the credentials and use them to access and wipe/close your account
Unless you create a sub-account that can only add photos to your main account, not delete anything. The credentials for your main account stay on your main device, usually a PC. Compare to banks: you need stronger authentication to withdraw money than to deposit money.
am I the only one who would like to see OSS repos become common on Android?
Does F-Droid count?
As a semi-pro photographer, I would buy 5 of these.
I have 3 Samsung Q20 camcorders, and they are simple HD cameras. Basic functionality such as time lapse and manual functionality are included. I would like the ability to do all of this with the benefits of Android.
For $200 a piece, I'd buy 5 of these.
Windows 8 dumbphone from Samsung?
I thougnt they are smart enough not to create garbage like that...
Or do they want to repeat Nokia's spectacular "success"?
> Samsung has also taken the wraps off the ATIV S,
> the first smartphone running Windows Phone 8.
I think the better name for it would be AID S.
Running windows 8?!?! THEY CLEARLY COPIED APPLE! You know, by...having an operating system and being not square.
All right, instant sharing from the phone or the camera can be practical. I can see a few uses of it, for party pictures or for lucky shots of your favorite movie star. Still, I can't help but think this is a niche for a digital camera, because it does not really fit in what I see as usual workflow with this device.
Notice that it is rather the same for DSLRs or point and shoots, for semi-pro photographers or families on holidays:
1- Take your camera
2- Go to an interesting place
3- Take many pictures (often too many pictures)
4- Spend time to sort the pictures and keep the best. Optionally crop and modify color balance. 5- Upload them to flickr/picasa/etc (or keep them for yourself)
6- Add titles/comments/captions to the uploaded pictures
Of course, the 4th step takes the longest time of the bunch. The problem is that it would be a pain to perform it from the camera. Even if Android improves the basic tools already available on point and shoots, the screen is still too small, and you cannot do side by side comparisons... So at the end of the day, I can see myself sorting/editing a few pictures from the camera, but not the tens or hundreds of pictures that usually quickly end up on my SD card. The ability to share directly from the camera would do little to help me.
On the contrary, the other prospect that is addressed in TFA is more interesting: using Android to access lower level control of the camera. But I doubt that we will see this feature on consumer point and shoots.
I also find GPS tagging to be an interesting feature, because it helps with the 6th step. But you do not need Android for this, and it still kills battery life.
First: I am not sure how having Android added "for purposes of sharing" is a waste. You may still be able to do other things with it, and at any rate, it will be able to do more than just about any other camera, even if it is a very limited version of Android.
Secondly, there already cameras that can tether to smart phones, like mine (Sony DSC-TX300V) which can tether to smart phones or computers for sharing.
Thirdly, Samsung just introduced the FIRST Windows 8 phone? I mean I don't give a flying shit about Windows 8, other than that I hope it died a quick death, but I thought Nokia and others had already released Windows 8 phones? No?
For all the mobile phone enthusiasts out there, here's a quick summary of some of the key highlights from Samsung's lineup which appeared at the Mobile World Congress....
So, Apple, are you going to assert your "rounded corners" design patent against that device? And if not, why not?
At this point, the only real question is how long it will take for Apple and MS to turn on each other after they've killed off Android. A New York minute?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I also own an Eye-Fi card that is installed inside a DSLR. I have it paired with my iPhone, and it sends a photo I take with the camera to the phone about 5 seconds after it is taken. I do agree that it is tad slow, but this direct camera-phone connection is pretty useful for me. It has effectively made my DSLR an iPhone accessory, so to speak, and I am able to upload high quality photos to Internet almost immediately.
Incidentally, I have never had any need for the card's ability to do automatic uploading on its own, whether to a computer or a social network because it was slow and redundant. It only acts as a direct-access path for my phone to the camera's photos.
Serving time in Aristotelean prison for violating laws of physics
...I wouldn't use an anagram of Vista.
I'd really love to have this camera, provided it doesn't cost too much and it's hackable.
I do a few projects with (network)cameras and they are massive piles of rotten spaghetti. Good network cameras are expensive, but their picture quality is also severely lacking. To counter quality issues, I sometimes use point and shoots which have higher pixel densities and far better lenses, producing much higher resolution and quality images. But, the still cameras then have to be connected to a computer to manage the image taking and processing. That makes things complicated. Also, the number of cameras that are PC controllable and don't cost a shit-ton of money are few and dwindling.
Smart phones are so close to what I want but just miss the mark. They have high pixel density cameras, WiFi, cellular data access, custom programmable(Android especially), cheap(relatively), TINY... They would make fantastic network cameras. But, because of their lenses, the image quality sucks!
I would LOVE to have this high res camera, programmable so that I can control image capture and processing, networkable so that I can put the images where I want rather than do the memcard shuffle or USB to a PC. But, it can't cost more than a couple of hundred dollars and it can't be locked down, it's got to be hackable!
How is this better than firmware-based cameras?
Is the responsiveness as perfect? Firmware can be better tested for responsiveness/crashes/etc. The truth is, Android can slow down, etc. What improvements do I get when it comes to, you know, taking pictures?
First is whether these cameras will have enough additional functionality to justify the added cost and weight when most people already have a serviceable camera in their phone.
UGH!! I'm getting tired of these types of comments. A camera in your phone is just not able to match an actual CAMERA for quality use. Until a phone has optical zoom and can accommodate lenses (which immediately makes it much less easily portable) this will not be possible.
P.S. Can we get rid of Timothy as an editor, or can he PLEASE take the time to fix the submissions before posting? I swear at least 95% of the time there is a story with misspellings/extra unnecessary words, etc., it's his.
Agile Spaceport - You will never find a more wretched hive of scrum and villainy. We must be cautious.
A decade ago, there was a small series of digital cameras that ran a somewhat-open OS: Slashdot covered DigitaOS before. Yes, some people ran games on their cameras; I was one. But more importantly, new applications could be developed. Long before EXIF and geotagging, there was a guy with a GPS hooked to the serial port (yes, back when cameras used RS232) of a camera, and a Digita program to save the coordinates where each shot was taken. There are countless new ideas waiting to happen, when an open OS is paired with serious optics. I can't wait.
No, THIS is the first post. I hereby claim first-postness on this story, and anyone who claims to have posted before me must pay ONE BILLION AMERICAN DOLLARS!!