Mar

18

2008

(2) Comments

How Usable is your Camera Phone?

02:27PM by Wayne Lam

If you are camera snob like I am, you’re probably wanting for a better camera phone.  Year after year, new phone models with higher mega-pixel count comes along but fails to impress in both quality and, more importantly, device usability. The sad fact is that camera phones are, by definition, primarily designed to make phone calls.  The taking picture part is largely a design after-thought or more likely a marketing gimmick to sell you a longer wireless contract.  But all is not lost, a new batch of 5MP camera phones are on their way from the major handset manufacturers.  These new generation of camera phones are finally making up for the failures of past models in both image quality and usability design. 

In this blog we will focus on 2 particular high end camera phones - Nokia N95 and the Sony Ericsson K850i.  Both phones are endowed with 5MP digital senors but each takes a different design philosophy to achieve their intended task.  Camera phones are all about opportunistic photography.  The value of the device is having the capability to take a picture when you least expect to.  Therefore, I believe camera phones should be judged on how usable they are in that purpose.