AllThingsD » cameraphone

Flickr's Digital Camera of Choice? iPhone.

John Paczkowski — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:29:06 +0000

Apple’s iPhone is fast becoming the go-to camera not just for smartphone users, but for the point-and-shoot crowd, too.

According to the latest usage data from Flickr, the iPhone 4 is the most popular camera on the photo-sharing service, surpassing not just the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, but the Nikon D90, Canon EOS Rebel T2i, and Canon EOS 7D, as well. No small achievement, considering Flickr’s 51 million registered users and the reputations of the competition. Which is not say that the iPhone matches any of those cameras in photo quality, just that it’s the tool of choice on the top photo-sharing site on the Web.

And that’s among both cameras and phones. The four most popular camera phones on Flickr currently? The iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS — in that order.

“We believe that the iPhone is actually becoming the digital camera of choice for consumers and enthusiasts in developed markets given its ease of use and ability to quickly get photos online,” says Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes. “This usability helps warrant a premium for the product and creates stickiness with software that connects consumers with other Apple products. The iPhone 4 is very popular on Flickr, and the iPhone 4S is gaining more steam given its popularity and camera improvements.”

Now, to reiterate, these stats are not a measure of digital camera use, but a measure of digital camera use on Flickr, which is not representative of the consumer photography market. That said, the numbers do speak to the iPhone’s ascendance among hobbyist photographers, and further reinforce a familiar idea: In the end, the best camera is the one you have with you.

(Image courtesy of Factron)

The Inside Story of Nokia's 41-Megapixel Camera Phone: Five Years in the Making

Ina Fried — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 08:25:22 +0000

If it were easy to put a decent zoom lens in a camera phone, Nokia might never have come up with its biggest breakthrough in imaging in years.

The technology in the 808 PureView phone introduced on Monday was the result of Nokia engineers struggling over the fact that optically zoomed lenses just don’t work well in tiny spaces like phones.

“We had been working for a long time [on] optical zooms and had learned the hard way how difficult it is to achieve good performance in smartphones,” Nokia head of imaging technologies Juha Alakarhu said in an interview last week. “Their structure is very complex and hard to manufacture.”

Plus, Alakarhu says, when zoomed in, such lenses let very little light in, meaning they don’t do well at night and suffer from a lack of sharpness.

Quite late one night, Alakarhu, Eero Salmelin and other colleagues were struck by another method. If a big enough sensor could be fitted into the phone, the camera could just zoom digitally and throw away the unneeded pixels.

“We were aware that it is possible to do zooming by very high resolution image sensor, but the idea of putting such a large and high resolution image sensor into a smartphone felt completely crazy,” Alakarhu said. “That was five years ago, and I guess it still feels like that.”

That said, Nokia has done it with the 808 PureView — or Hyperion, as it was code-named during development.

As Alakarhu and colleagues showed AllThingsD the camera technology last week, they were practically bursting at the seams. After all, they had been working on the technology in secret for the last five years.

Part of the challenge now will be explaining to the consumer why anyone needs that many megapixels.

One of the key advantages is it lets you zoom in three or four times in either photos or video and still have a sharp image. The picture of the camera, here, for example, is taken from the same wide shot of the camera and its sensors. In videos, the technology allows one to zoom in close while still maintaining an HD resolution.

Another plus is that the camera uses so-called “oversampling” to shrink the image while still making use of the information in the large number of pixels. Nokia said it can create a better five-megapixel image by using the data in the seven extra pixels to inform which single pixel it uses.

To illustrate the imaging quality, Nokia’s development team has quietly been traveling the globe and taking pictures at the full resolution of the camera. From the shots, the team has created massive prints rivaling those from professional cameras.

Alakarhu was in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and wanted to get a few shots. But he was in a city filled with reporters and competitors.

To provide some cover, Alakarhu wrapped the phone in a thick rubber case to mask its design. Meanwhile, he tried to keep the phone literally close to his vest, lest anyone look too closely at the screen and notice things like a 41-megapixel resolution.

“I guess I felt a little bit like James Bond with a very special new gadget in a secret mission,” Alakarhu said. “It was fun, of course, even though I had to be very careful.”

One of the areas where Nokia is bound to be criticized — especially in North America — is the fact that it is bringing the camera technology first to its bound-for-extinction Symbian platform rather than to Windows Phone, which is its future. Nokia doesn’t even sell Symbian phones in the United States any more.

Developing the 808 for Symbian was necessary for a few reasons. First, as mentioned, Nokia has been working on this technology for five years and only gotten to know Windows Phone over the past year. Also, because it controls Symbian, it can craft the camera app and operating system fully to its liking.

That said, Nokia is promising the technology will eventually make its way to Windows Phone as well. It is not, however, giving a time frame.

In an interview, Nokia smartphone unit head Jo Harlow declined to say if the PureView technology would show up in Windows Phones this year, but said she is not worried about any technical hurdles involved in making the move.

“I’m not at all concerned about work that needs to be done to bring it to Windows Phone,” Harlow said.

For his part, Windows Phone head Terry Myerson said he is looking forward to the day when his wife stops carrying a high-end digital camera and uses a PureView-equipped Windows Phone instead.

Here’s a picture of part of the 808 team, also taken with the 808.

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T-Mobile and HTC Team Up on High-End Android Phone for Shutterbugs

Ina Fried — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 04:00:18 +0000

While the name suggests that the T-Mobile MyTouch 4G Slide is just another high-end Android phone, its photography features could let the device stand out from the pack.

The new device, which T-Mobile plans to ship sometime next month, packs a number of hardware and software features for the photo enthusiast, including an 8-megapixel camera, a wide-aperture lens, no shutter lag and a dedicated hardware button that lets users skip the lock screen and go straight from sleep mode to taking pictures. That last feature is a popular option on Windows Phone 7 and Apple is working to add something similar with iOS 5.

Overall, the phone is designed to earn a place in the hearts of smartphone buyers, who increasingly count on their phones to serve as their primary point-and-shoot camera.

“Knowing that the best camera is the one you’ve got with you, we set out to create a new best-in-class smartphone that allows our customers to leave their cameras at home,” T-Mobile Senior VP Andrew Sherrard said in a statement. “Our newest myTouch device takes capturing and sharing memories to a new level by combining high-quality smartphone hardware with features that customers would expect from a top-of-the-line digital camera.”

The device is also capable uploading images directly to Facebook, Picasa and Flickr and of recording 1080p high-definition. The myTouch 4G Slide also comes with several photo programs, including one that takes panoramic photos and another that allows several photos to be taken in a single burst.

On the non-photo side, the phone comes in two colors (black and khaki) and packs a slide-out keyboard, Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), a 1.2 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon chip and a 3.7-inch screen.

T-Mobile has yet to announce pricing or exact availability for the device.

What App Makers Say About Nokia's Store

Christopher Lawton — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 16:45:46 +0000

This week Nokia took to a mobile conference San Francisco to woo U.S. application developers to its Ovi mobile application store. The company has taken some knocks lately for missing out on a smartphone revolution that has catapulted Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone to godlike status in the Western world.

Discussions with developers show that Nokia (NOK) is making some headway in proving its value in a Silicon Valley preoccupied with Steve Jobs and Google (GOOG), but it’s still got a ways to go.

Nokia approached Andy Sheldon, founder and chief executive of San Francisco-based Fizwoz, at a Silicon Valley event in December, after he had showed off his Fizwoz application, a mobile auction application that connects cameraphone users to photo editors who could potentially buy their images. A month earlier, the company had launched a beta version of its application in the Apple App Store.

Mr. Sheldon says Nokia sat down with him and explained its geographical reach, and how it sells more smartphones a day than the competition. Nokia waived its access fees for the Ovi Store and even pointed Fizwoz to freelance developers it could use to develop the application for Nokia.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

(Long) Weekend Update, 1.19.09

Beth Callaghan — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:56:25 +0000

The Web never stops publishing, but a tech blog definitely slows down on a market holiday. To wit: A (Long) Weekend Update, and best wishes on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Digital Daily covered the Steve Jobs story this week, starting with the all-hands memo in which the Apple (AAPL) founder announced his medical leave and following through with the reactions of both Wall Street and the company’s investors. Then there’s the general response, which has been variously diagnosing Jobs’s health issues and predicting the demise of Apple without him–not without good reason, but quite a departure from the reaction when Bill Gates left Microsoft (MSFT). Digital Daily also noted that even though Palm’s (PALM) stock price made a jump directly after the introduction of the Pre and its new Web OS, the company will need to sell a lot of phones in order to attract a robust community of developers. And let’s not forget the roll call of fallen companies, including two of the latest to fall victim to the econalypse, Nortel (NT) and Circuit City (CC).

Can Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim save the New York Times? MediaMemo had the story of the gray lady’s possible white knight, plus coverage of some recent ideas about how newspapers in general can be rescued from a grim fate. Hint: not by a Facebook event. There are some bright spots for traditional media, though, made possible by the increasingly social Web. Incredible photos are often made available for free and as news is breaking, saving editors from the limitations and high prices they’re accustomed to from established agencies. A perfect example arose this week when U.S. Airways flight 1549 made a spectacular emergency landing on the Hudson. Twitter, a camera phone and an incredible photo almost singlehandedly changed the way people think about citizen journalism–as an aid to, not a replacement for, professional reporting.

At the Consumer Electronics Show, BoomTown moderated the SuperSession panel titled “What Will They Think of Next? Consumer Technology in 2025.” A lot of the discussion involved pretty much the general consensus of what’s on the horizon, but there were some edgier ideas from the panel, which included an interesting cross section of the digital industry. BoomTown interviewed all of the participants on camera afterward about their visions of 2025, and some of the results were pretty funny. Of course, BoomTown had a say about the various degrees of silence and hysteria surrounding Steve Jobs’s health issues, urging people to put things in perspective, and evoking his 2005 commencement speech, in which he advised graduates to “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.” BoomTown says: Not this foolish. The passing of the leadership torch at Yahoo (YHOO) took center stage last week, starting with the classy exit of Sue Decker and her memo to the troops. Next up: Yahoo’s official announcement of Carol Bartz as CEO and her first words as its fearless leader: “Yahoooo!” and “Friggin’.” Here’s full coverage of the transition.

Walt Mossberg voiced his strong and sensible opinion about the media circus surrounding Steve Jobs’s leave of absence on Fox Business last week, which is, first and foremost, concern for the man and best wishes for his recovery. On the gadget front, he discusses different options for putting e-books on your cellphone and Web OS, the new operating system that debuted with the Palm Pre. Katie Boehret looked at a couple of Web search tools that deliver better results by paying attention to what results you click on.

More next week. Wait–later this week.

Friends and Family Have a New Way to Just Drop In

Nick Wingfield — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 02:18:03 +0000

Digital-picture frames have started to take off as a way for people to show off their stashes of digital photos in rotating slide shows. A growing number of frames even connect to wireless home networks so they can easily be refreshed with photos stored online and on PCs.

But keeping those types of digital-photo frames up-to-date with new pictures demands more technical skill than many parents and grandparents are likely to have. It requires, for example, rudimentary knowledge of how to configure a home Wi-Fi network or shuttle storage cards between a frame and a digital camera. Still, digital frames are a great way to keep generations in touch with, say, a far-flung child’s latest ballet recital or a football game.

Just in time for the holidays, the wireless carrier T-Mobile is selling a digital-photo frame that makes it easy to set up and to keep fresh. While I found the Cameo excels in its simplicity, it comes with a number of annoying drawbacks and a pricing model that will limit its appeal. It sells for a reasonable $99.99 in T-Mobile stores, but carries a hefty $9.99 monthly fee.

Still, Cameo is an exciting first edition of a product.

First, its strengths. The picture frame is as easy to operate as a cellphone, containing some of the same technical innards of a wireless handset. And each Cameo has a unique phone number, just like a cellphone, that lets anyone who knows the number to “dial” it up — sending messages containing digital photographs instead of voice calls.

Setting up Cameo is as easy as taking it out of a box, screwing a stick into the back to prop up the frame and plugging it into an electrical outlet. The Cameo has a seven-inch color display and one of the more attractive borders I’ve seen on a digital photo frame: imitation black leather with white stitching.

Users themselves can manually load images onto the frame from a PC by connecting it through a USB cable or by inserting a miniature storage card from a digital camera.

Cameo can receive pictures wirelessly two ways. The owner of the frame hands out the Cameo’s phone number to friends and family members, who then send pictures to the frame that were taken with the cameras standard on most modern cellphones. This method uses MMS, or multimedia messaging service, a communications standard normally used to share pictures and other media between cellphones.

Cameo owners also can give out an email address for their picture frames that is based on their Cameo’s phone number, allowing people to email images that they’ve downloaded to their computers from digital cameras.

The first time the frame receives a picture from an email address or phone number, Cameo asks the frame owner to push a button on the back of the frame to place the sender on an approved list. After that, all images from the approved source appear automatically on the frame — a method that at least keeps random people’s photos from popping up in grandma’s living room.

There’s a wonderful unpredictability to how Cameo works. Imagine all of the kids and grandkids in a sprawling family room in different locations being able to send snapshots to each other. This is possible now with photo-sharing sites like Flickr, but those typically require going to a Web site. Images on a Cameo just show up without warning on your kitchen countertop, living room or office desk.

I handed out my Cameo number to some colleagues and was delighted when their cameraphone pictures began trickling into my frame, including a shot of the New York neighborhood in which one of them lives, and an image of another colleague ice skating.

The Cameo’s screen, featuring 720×480 pixels, isn’t the highest-resolution digital photo frame on the market, but the pictures looked fine to me. You can do a slide show for any number of images, chose a fade-out or other transition, change the order of the photos and alter the display speed — holding a single image for up to an hour.

Unfortunately, the frame has a skimpy 64 megabytes of memory, and storage capacity isn’t expandable. There is enough room for only about 200 photos at maximum size. Once it’s full, you have to make room by manually deleting photos.

Another problem is that the frame currently is available only to existing T-Mobile cellular subscribers.

By far, the biggest turnoff is the monthly fee for the cellular service that delivers the pictures to the frame. There’s no limit on how many pictures can be sent to a Cameo under T-Mobile’s cellular plan, but $120 a year is a steep price.

The carrier says it will consider other pricing options in the future. Until it does, it’s going to be tough for most people to buy the Cameo, even for a beloved family member.

Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

Write to Nick Wingfield at nick.wingfield@wsj.com