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Calling all strawman. Strawmen, please bring your hyperbolic arguments to the checkout counter.

Please enlighten us with your all knowing knowledge about what makes for good hardware.

After using an N8 against the iPhone4 camera wise, I can say for sure that the N8 blows the iPhone4's camera away. There is simply no contest but you in your infinite wisdom and technology tower already know this. So again, please tell us what we should already know. Speak ole wise one. Disseminate to the masses and impart your wisdom.

One thing I can agree with you is the first part of your statement: "I don't think"

Well, as long as you are here, we always have at least one person who has no idea what he's talking about.

Well, that much is obvious about you.

Sorry, but I'm not going to accept your word about how great the N8 camera is. Find some objective 3rd party evaluations and get back to us. And you still haven't shown us how other hardware is, "blowing the iPhone away." As I mentioned before, even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that the N8 has a camera that, "blows the iPhone away," that doesn't mean that the hardware is great overall. And please, don't quote specs at us, they are largely meaningless in this discussion.

The camera HW is better. That point should be clear. To recap, each image sensor is the exact same size as in the iPhone 4, yet they have 12 million of them, not 5 million, or 2.4x as many as the iPhone 4. Thats a much large area capturing a lot more light. Thats a fact.

Also stated earlier is that isnt just a single spec trick of megapixels as the size of each image sensor is also noted. The only unknown is how the SW works to render the image, but a simple Google search should resolve that. To my eyes on my display the N8 images are considerably better than the iPhone 4, but since I dont care about cameras in phones that single feature is moot.

Another vapid, senseless argument from you. The only thing missing is the: "I'm rubber, you're glue".


Universal translation: "no matter what findings you post, I will not accept them because my narcissistic, sociopathic proclivities will not allow it". There are plenty of 3rd party, non-Nokia evaluations that have gone over the N8 and iPhone photo qualities and the N8 won every time. Sorry if you spend so much of your time down Steve Jobs' pants that you have no knowledge of any other competing devices that you make ad homonym statements out the side of your neck. In short believe or don't believe. I really don't care.

I hardly think an actual comment is necessary.

Well, that's the important point, what do the images look like. (sapporobabyrtrns apparently has links to all sorts of objective comparisons that he's not going to share with us.) To be fair, one has to take the same pictures in the same lighting to actually be able to compare them. But, the important point in this discussion is that even if we grant that smartphone X has a great hardware feature A, that doesn't say anything about the overall hardware quality of smartphone X vs. the iPhone. It certainly doesn't support a claim that it, "blows the iPhone away." Anyone pointing at specific features like that (and admittedly ignoring others) is not making an honest, or credible, argument. Or, just has no understanding of what they are talking about.

Heres the first link from my Google search. These are images taken of the same item at the same time. As you can see they are not the same images because even the lens HW is different. Then you have the way the SW renders the images.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/30/n...mera-showdown/ You can read the comments. Some say the iPhone 4 looks better with others arguing that the N8 is taking more realistic images and vice versa. Thats why I didnt want to post images. Its too subjective. And viewing some compressed image format on a typical display isnt going to work either. But that is SW so you can adjust it, what you cant adjust is the HW and the N8 beats the iPhone 4 hands down with that overly large sensor area.

Exactly. Way to explain it that even the most clueless can comprehend. Hearing, like seeing is sometimes subjective. Case in point. I have a pair of Shure SE 535 headphones. My friend has the SE 530's. He says they sound the same as the 535's while I can clearly hear the difference in the two headsets. The same can be said of photos. In one of the Nokia forums someone actually said the N8 can compete with a Nikon D3S which is pure insanity, but this is based on a subjective opinion. When compared side by side, the N8 out performs the iPhone in similar conditions based on the s/w processing the image, optics, etc...

There are a couple of things this makes clear:

1. The N8 does not "blow away" the iPhone 4 in terms of the camera.

2. One can't say that one camera is better than another based strictly on specs like Mpx or sensor size. There are obviously a number of components that go into making a good camera, and on a smartphone, at least, one of those is software (not to mention the lens and other components), so it's meaningless to talk about how much better phone X's camera is than camera Y's based strictly on a few hardware specs.

sapporobabyrtrns first said “the hardware on Nokia phones” referring to all in response to the article’s author. I called him on that and he stated he meant some. I pointed out that some of the camera HW is far superior to the iPhone 4. I tried not to get into the subjective aspects of which is a better camera or whatnot. The bottom line is that the N8’s image sensor area is 2.4x as large as the iPhone 4 with each sensor being the same size. This is far superior in and of itself. My point wasn’t to state which is the best phone for taking images or if all the camera components of the N8 are better; I don’t know and don’t care, I was simply pointing out that there are clearly some HW that is better than what the iPhone 4 uses.

Here’s another. LG has announced a smartphone that is thinner than the iPhone 4 and uses a dual-core Cortex-A9. Surely you would say that is better than what the iPhone 4 has, and it should be with the LG device likely not to ship for months and the iPhone on the bottom half of its lifecycle. Even if the iPhone 5 using a Cortex-A8 base and the LG smartphone came out today it wouldn’t make a difference to me as the CPU speed isn’t my biggest concern with a smartphone.

Another example is LTE. That is a ‘better” than the HS*PA in the iPhone 4. However, it’s also a large power hungry chip and AT&T’s ‘3G’ network is still faster than Verizon’s ‘4G’ network. The only factor is what aspects suit you. Again, those are subjective and not the point of my original comment.

I think we’re all on the same page here, we’re just looking at it from different perspectives.

Well, ignoring for a moment the wildly exaggerated and unsupportable claims of some posters, the point I'm making is twofold:

1. You cannot claim a hardware component is better based on superficial specs.

Sensor size will turn out to be just as misleading as Mpx for camera quality. Is the sensor backlit? Are there differences in quality? And so on, and so on... For cameras, the lens may well be more important than the sensor. There are a whole host of factors that go into making a good camera and just because people now starting to get that Mpx aren't the biggest factor in image quality, that manufacturers have been using Mpx counts to BS the public, the same mistake ought not be made in regard to sensor size as being some sort of magic indicator of image quality.

It's particularly tempting for tech people to fall into the spec trap -- it's "objective", easy to understand and quote, etc. -- but relying solely on these sort of specs is allowing oneself to be misled in exactly the way that manufacturers want to mislead the public.

2. Looking at particular specs, or components, in isolation is, again, not an accurate way to judge overall hardware quality (a nebulous term to begin with).

To use an example of yours, a dual-core Cortex-A9 sounds great, but what effect does that have on battery life? Does it matter if the screen sucks, or the device as a whole feels like a piece of crap... or, more importantly, if the software can't really use it effectively? Getting hung up on individual component specs is, again, a trap. Just like with a camera, where the quality depends on all of the components and how they are put together, the smartphone as device depends on all of it's components and how they are all put together; and one of the things putting them together is software. So, is it actually meaningful to say that phone X has great hardware if it isn't well put together, as a hardware design and by the software that makes it all work? I don't think so.

For my needs the iPhone camera is fine for some situations.

But, for most uses, I need high-quality optical zoom of at least 10x or 12x.

Until (if ever) the phone form factor (try saying that fast, 3 times) permits optical zoom, then I will carry at least 1 other camera for most photography uses.

...

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I actually tried to use my iPhone this morning. Saw a huge field with what I assume are brand new jumbo airlines sitting out. A few dozens of them. It would have been an impressive photo but all I had was my iPhone 4 and lack of an optical zoom and that tiny lens made them look really far away.

Smartphones have space constraints and are primarily used for up close photos so I dont feel that it failed me, but I wasnt expecting it to look as bad as it did. You wont even notice them unless you look for them. The foreground landscape looks nice, though.

The far majority of time in social situations wide angle lens is necessary. Telephoto lens is a whole different set up that isn't really practical for a smartphone. Point and shoot cameras don't have very good telephoto lens either.

At least nothing near as good as a telephoto lens for an SLR.

I wouldn't have expected any more a response than this. It almost makes one wonder if you're a spambot I've seen this very same "you don't know what you're talking about" response soooo many times.

Give it a rest.

The very fact that the N8 has a lager sensor lends itself to taking better low light photos than the iPhone is capable of. This is just physics. It is similar to the comparison between a DX camera and an FX camera. Try shooting a Nikon D300s vs. a Nikon D3s (I have both) in low light, and the results are quite obvious. Even if you put a faster f2.8 lens on the D300s and use a normal f3.5 - 5.6 on the D3s, the D3s will win every time because of the sensor size. If this is not obvious to some here then there is no need to discuss this further.

Not exactly.

Low light sensitivity isn't based on the size of the entire sensor itself. Its based on the ability of the photosites to gather light. Generally larger sensors have smaller pixels to pack in more photosites, that leads to less sensitivity to light. Better light sensitivity comes from larger pixels and larger photosites.

In DSLR's they are able to increase the sensor size without shrinking the pixels and photosites very much.

Exactly TB. My point. I was thinking that because the sensor is larger, like in my D3S it will perform better in low light situations.