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Kodak-Branded Smartphones On the Way
An anonymous reader sends news about Kodak's latest attempt to come back from the grave. "For a while there it looked like Kodak's moment had come and gone, but the past few months have seen the imaging icon fight back from the brink of irrelevance. Now the company's planning to push a Kodak-branded smartphone, and thankfully it's not going to sue everyone in the business along the way this time. To be clear, Kodak won't actually make its own devices — instead, it's going to farm out most of the development work to an English company called Bullitt."
Kodak is back! and it don't want you to label your discs in a printer w/o patent payment.
Old school company decides it's way out of bankruptcy is to compete in a market where one leader takes more profit than all the other competitors put together, and the other leader has more market share than anyone else. What could possibly go wrong?
Sorry guys, you should be looking to sell Kodak-licensed camera tech to the big smartphone vendors.
sounds suspiciously like... (clue: bs)
That's not Kodak, as they are dead. In their dying spasm they sold their name so it can be placed on mediocre rebadged crap. It's disingenuous to talk about Kodak as if their lineage of innovation continues, and isn't just some jerkoffs who bought a famous brand name and are pushing trash and stomping that name into ground until all possible profit can be reamed loose.
Kodak is ok for that but I always wondered why Radio Shack didn't make their own branded smartphones. Realistic was a decent name back in the day, and unlike Kodak they actually sold phones.
ZTE or one of a million other cheap crappy china phones that you can already buy flat out for 49.99 with anyone else's logo on it
big fucking deal
The only way Kodak can really make a difference in the already crowded smartphone market is to equip the Kodak branded smartphone with its own 50 Megapixel CCD sensor
If Kodak can do that then it has a fighting chance
If Kodak can't, hey, it won't be that much difference from yet-another-reference-design smartphone, aka, the " white-box "
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Instead of calling the device a smartphone equipped with a 50 MP camera, they can market it as a 50 MP camera which is 4G/5G/6G enabled, plus it can make phone calls too
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
There is no Kodak. Fuck whatever is calling itself Kodak today. Kodak died with Kodachrome in 2010.
Branding something with a well-known but dead brand is for idiots.
1. Don't actually develop technology
2. Hire another company to build smart phones with no particularly compelling features
3. ????????
4. Profit!
Exactly HOW does that bring a company back from irrelevancy?
Unless they are planning to acquire some whiz-bang startup with new tech or a new social paradigm that is going to make them stand out, this will just continue their slide into obscurity.
To be clear, Kodak won't actually make its own devices
Good thing! Kodak has been shit at this since they started using electronics. The interfaces to their digital cameras were literally the worst in the business.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I own a cat b25, the ruggedized phone made by these guys. It's good because it's rugged and dumb but the engineering flaws of the phone shine through.
They couldn't even get t9 implementation right and that tech is old as shit. Not to mention that the phone is a exact clone of a Nokia with the exception of the flawed t9, I don't think they have the chops for any phone manufacturing.
Anyway, rip kodak, you always sucked anyway
Kodak was a dominant technology corporation for over a century. They were dominant through economic downturns, world wars, cultural changes and across industrial sectors. They were one of a handful of the most recognizable brand names of the entire 20th century (they started in 1888). They did business in three centuries.
I'm pretty sure that qualifies as more than a "moment".
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah, I hope not either! I'd already seen that a month or two back, and even then it struck me as a quick-and-lazy attempt to exploit nostalgia for the original Instamatic line by slapping an Instamatic-mimicking front panel and viewfinder on an Android-based touchscreen camera which doesn't remotely resemble the originals otherwise.
Pretty sure you could design a stick-on case for a smartphone that would have the same effect (and be about as convincing).
My suspicion that this was aimed at Instagram users who weren't around at the time was confirmed when I saw the promo YouTube video and some guy commented that "As a photographer, I'd like one... But my carrier probably won't sell them. It looks like its gonna have a pretty decent lens and sensor. Can't wait to see if it performs.".
Er, yeah. Know how I guessed even *before* checking his profile that he was way too young to have been around at the time of the original Instamatic? As I said in my reply:-
"Decent lens"?! Dude, if this "Instamatic" was to remotely resemble my 1983 model- or almost any other real Instamatic for that matter- it'd have to include a dirt-cheap fixed-focus, fixed-focal-length lens with minor chromatic aberration that was just about good enough for 4 x 4" prints, have a choice of two literally settings at all (sunny and cloudy/flash) and include an attachment for disposable single-use "Magicube" flashes that cost as much as the film again.
:-)
Yeah, I had an Instamatic, and I'm not going to damn a cheap camera aimed at holiday snappers for its limitations back when decent cameras were expensive and fiddly. And I can understand the novelty if you've grown up with digital cameras that deliver shiny, perfect results at cheap prices. But let's be honest here, the Instamatic was pretty crap; if you want it to be good, you don't actually want an Instamatic.
(*) Footer on Instamatic phone website: "The INSTAMATIC 2014 Camera - Phone is a design concept by IDIDIDD for Eastman Kodak Company and this product is not available for sale."
They should bring back the Polaroid, integrate a digital camera into a Polaroid so you gets your digital and your hard copy.
But this? A phone? Bah it will fail.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Kodak is going to face some stiff competition from Uncle Ben's! http://www.theonion.com/articl...
Anyway, I'm holding out for a Commodore smart phone!
Why? We all know by this point that such a thing would almost certainly consist of the "chickenhead" logo slapped on some otherwise generic middle-of-the-road smartphone hardware by a third-party licensor armed with a "Commodore is back!" press release (dumbly repeated by the mainstream press) and designed to exploit nostalgia as cheaply and with as little effort as possible.
They might even slap a cheap pastiche of the C64 case on the front if you're *very* lucky (cough).
As I've previously commented, the Commodore and Amiga brands and IP are a confusing mess, and many of the names have been exploited for very cheap nostalgic purposes. The same company that made the Commodore 64x- i.e. a PC in a case that at least *looked* like the computer it was meant to be "resurrecting"- also made new "Vic" all-in-one PCs that looked little to nothing like their namesake and even worse sold HTPC cases that didn't even resemble the original Amiga line under names of classic machines like Amiga 1000.
So, seriously. Commodore is long-dead, and while overpriced hardware is still sold to exploit the rabid diehards who want to run "Amiga OS" in 2014, anything likely to end up on a smartphone *will* be meaningless name whoring that has nothing to do with anything Commodore themselves did. Whoever "officially" owns the relevant fragment of the disputed rights this week means sod all.
If you want a "Commodore" smartphone, get a sticker from some guy on eBay, stick it on the phone of your choice, and it'll be as much a "Commodore" as anything produced by a licensor of a licensor of a guy who once knew the third owner of the rights to the "Commodore plus/4" brand after it was retrieved them from Gateway's dumpster in the late 1990s.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
... I'd love a Studebaker smartphone, but I would die for an Exidy Sorcerer smartphone.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Made radios in the 1930s through 1960s. An Israeli company bought the brand and made cheap low-quality computers branded "Packard bell".
meh, they might as well be sitting in Shenzen making Chinese copies of Korean stuff, it's all relabelling.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
A similar situation, what is now Atari, isn't.
Already! You got me again slashdot.
Seriously, they are pulling a sears or radio shack.
The end is near for Kodak.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
For all those who might recall they were trying to get into the printer business, but failed to even produce a driver for GNU/Linux. Remind me again why anybody thinks the company has any value left in the name?
They're still around. I visited one recently, and they even had Arduinos and other electronic self-assembly kits.
Like in Paul Simon's "Kodachrome"..."Please don't take my Kodak Phone away!"
Seriously, why?