Finally a phone with the UI to match iphone

I watched the videos.

What's so groundbreaking? Looks ok from the small clips but I wouldn't be loosing sleep if I worked on the iPhone team at Apple.

Also this comes from Sony. The people that known for user friendly right? Have you seen this (which is hilarious if a bit over the top)?

I fail to see how an interface which is obviously based on the influence the introduction of the iPhone has had on a range of manufacturers could be described as "groundbreaking".

This looks like an excellent phone.

Does anyone know if 640x360 is a restriction of Symbian as the Winmo based Xperia has an 800x480 screen resolution.

"Groundbreaking" is typically used to refer to products that are innovative at the time of their introduction, 2007 in the case of the iPhone. A product that has been introduced two years later cannot remove the iPhone's "groundbreaking" status.


As for the videos, the interface is not that exciting.

It looks like you can swipe from picture to picture, with a little extra animation thrown in.

Not seeing how that makes the UI particularly special.

Why in the name of God would I want a 12MP in my phone? The average consumer couldn't make good use of that in a full sized camera, and in a phone, with its tiny sensor and constrained lensing, it makes no technical sense whatsoever. Mindless spec whoring is exactly what's wrong with the entire consumer electronics industry.

The entire ad on Sony Ericsson's website is about the camera and the JQuery slideshow interface.

Nothing about the Operating System, the Application platform, the actual Tech Specs [other than the camera], the developer platform, the third parties involved in writing applications, so on and so forth.

It's pretty much a glorified camera phone.

You know frankly I wasn't all that impressed with the iPhone when I first saw it. I mean a pretty UI is nice but a great UI is heavy on functionality and if it looks great that's the cream on top. What makes the iPhone groundbreaking is how it allows people to use more features of their phone.

You don't know how well a phone is going to work until you're making calls on it...conferencing, web browsing and more and get to see how it switches contexts.

Every week we have a new thread about the newest phone that's supposedly an iPhone killer based on demoware.

The Pre
The Toshiba
Now the Sony.

They may all be great phones but the proof will in how they integrate all the auxiliary features with the basics...making phone calls.

It should be a fun year.

Me Drool toooooo.

I'm an AMOLED whore. I mean when you can take a photograph of two phones, one with AMOLED and the other without and you can clearly see the contrast improvement in AMOLED it's about that time. Maybe we get lucky and the iPhone delivers AMOLED this year.

Also I was thinking about these micro flash HD recorders from
Kodak, Sanyo, Flip Mino and more.

Now seeing as how iMovie has anti-shake technology it means that video with less than a steady hand can be salvaged which means Apple doesn't have to worry about image stabilzation as much. They can focus on an iPhone with good optics and sane megapixel amounts. Let us capture 720p 5mbps that can be sent right to an AppleTV or Mac/PC.

It only takes 4GB of storage for an hour of 720p video. I'd bump up to the larger size if Apple gives me HD video capability.

You're right though..this industry will NOT let you rest on your laurels. Apple is going to have to deliver some much improved functionality. Imagine

Turn by Turn GPS
HD video recording
Digital Output (maybe too early..we'll see)
More fluid OS w/push notification
Some sort of "I didn't see that coming" feature out of left field.

The Symbian Foundation is bleeding like a fire hydrant it's developer base--most of which are now on the iPhone.

The iPhone SDK and obvious marketshare explosion makes is a requirement that they produce more information about their developer toolkits and strategy before they release the phone.

All these ducks were in a row, by Apple, who then staggered their release via marketing. When Apple takes over the majority smartphone with just 3 phones manufactured it's clear that those dozens and dozens of phones based on the SymbianOS or Nokia or Windows Mobile were too confident in their analysis on delivering a complete vertical solution.

More to the point, they didn't expect AT&T to comply with Apple and thus keep their foothold for them.

Kudos to AT&T for their smart exclusivity and taking such a gamble.

why the heck would you want HD video recording on a phone with a tiny lens and tiny sensor?!

Because it would still be better than SD.

To go with the HDMI out, off course!

The Samsung has the same processor as the Palm Pre and is capable of handling a 3Mb/s video stream.

The touchscreen is 640x480 and is capacitive, it will be powered by a 1500 mAh battery and will come in 8 and 16Gb models with a further 16Gb microSD support.

The Idou is a concept phone whereas the i8910 is ready for production and is set for a Q2 release.

I don't think Samsung is trying to compete with Apple, they are after number one which is Nokia.

Not necessarily. Just like anything its not that simple. Just because you have more pixels does not automatically mean you have a better picture.

Their are a lot of visual tricks to make an image appear as though it contains more visual information than it does. Interpolation, edge sharpening, and added contrast fool the eye into seeing a sharper image than what is actually there, its just smoke and mirrors.

The true measurement of how much information an imaging system can record is called modulated transfer function. Its a test where you start with 2 rows of 2 squares: black white, white black, as if you had 4 pixels on the screen. You double the squares to 8 pixels, 16 pixels and so on. Once you've multiplied the number of squares until they equal the number of pixels that the imager claims to record, you should still be able to clearly see defined black and white squares.

Most of the time when this type of test is done, the squares become a mass of grey long before they equal the resolution that's claimed for the imaging system. What this means is that the imaging system is not really recording an image with the number of pixels it claims. Artificial tricks are being used to make the image appear sharper. In the end is you have a larger file that is devoid of actual visual information.

For all of the reasons I mentioned in my earlier post, that Nokia 8MP camera is rubbish to this 8MP camera.

If you put both cameras through the test I mentioned, the difference would be stark and clear.

Too bad Sharp only used a 29mm lens on their phone's dating back a few years but they use CCD sensors.

I don't see the point of adding thickness and weight to a phone for a higher megapixel camera that ultimately takes crappy pictures and video.

Why would you compare a camera and a phone?

useless

If they are both 8MP cameras, why not? If a camera phone cannot stand on its own then what is the point of adding more pixels?

Not likely, marketing has fooled them into thinking they actually have a 5 or 8MP camera.


Its only nonsesne to someone who wants to ignore the truth, you in particular keep demanding better camera phones, and choose to ignore the realities of how cameras actually work. You cannot simply add more pixels and get a significantly better image, that is simply a fact.


People do like using camera phones. The manufacturer will market camera phones with higher pixels because they know people are easily marketed to. The manufacturers know these pixels tricks aren't true, but they will sell them if people will buy them.


No one markets LED screens as having the same functionality of AMOLED screens.


What I'm saying does have bearing on the industry. People can clearly see that camera phones are crap, camera phones have not effected the sales of dedicated point and shoot cameras. Efficiently using pixels to create a smaller resolution picture will actually yield a sharper picture, than attempting to use more numerous and smaller pixels to create a picture with more resolution. This is simply the way it works.

Perhaps in North America we are savvy enough to not wish for a bulkier phone simply to add a sub-par camera that will never be able to take a picture as good as a dedicated camera.

Their of course is no official list of the best selling phones. Every list somewhat shifts the same phones around in different order. But clearly no list shows a correlation of the best selling phones having the most megapixels.

I'm sure Apple is willing to include a camera with more megapixels if it doesn't force an increase in the phones size. I'm sure the camera is at the bottom of Apple's priority list.

The UI on the Sony phone reminds me of what we've seen of the Zune HD-- some pretty animations that don't appear to add anything at all to usability.

Not to say it won't be a good phone, but I get the impression that everyone's decided that the way to compete with the iPhone is to make big touch screens with cool animations.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is exactly the kind of cluelessness that allowed Apple to break into the phone market in such a big way. It's like "usability" just isn't a part of these guys conceptual framework, and when confronted by the success of the iPhone all they can think is "stuff moves around, we should do that."

To be fair, doing those things does get you pretty close to the iPhone. A big touchscreen button that says 'Internet' that when opened allows you to select from stored bookmarks, or type an address, which you can then navigate with your finger, double tapping to zoom in etc, and in a lot of cases, pinch to zoom, sounds an awful lot like the iPhone experience to me. A big 'email' button that you touch to compose and read email, also sounds a lot like the iPhone.

Usability is such a buzz word that really means very little these days. You can do the same thing on either device, but how you go about achieving them is different. Just because they work in different ways does not suddenly mean one is less usable than the other. In fact, someone who already has an S60 device will probably find the SE far more usable, because they already know the OS, whereas there'd be a learning curve to use the iPhone. Which device is more usable in that instance then? Suddenly it's the SE, and we wonder if Apple ever considered usability when designing the iPhone.

I plonked my iPhone in front of my sister and mum yesterday to show them some photos. I had to show them how to move between the photos because they had no idea just from looking at the device. They do know how to move between photos on their Nokia phones. To them, their Nokia devices are more usable, because they know how to use them!

So, in conclusion, usability means very little when looking at these devices because what might be usable for one person, isn't for another! LOL, mini essay over.

Why are you saying second? What about Android, or the Pre? (Granted, the latter isn't shipping, but the former certainly is.)

I don't think that's S60. S60 is a GUI toolkit and API set, similar to Cocoa. It's not the OS underneath.

Amorya

The SE Satio (to give the Idou it's proper name) has been officially announced and will go on sale in September.

It seems Open Symbian will not be ready in time so it will use Symbian S60 v5, the same as the Nokia 5800 and the soon to be released N97 and Samsung Omnia HD.

Meanwhile Samsung has announced the Pixon12 with a 12.1 megapixel camera, 28mm wide angle lens and xenon flash, although it's not a smartphone the camera will probably appear in the next Omnia model.

The Nokia 1100 is the largest selling mobile phone ever, it doesn't have a camera, the 6300 is one of the largest selling phones it has a 2 megapixel camera the average for all phones sold is likely to be between these points based on the sheer volume of these handsets sold.

Those would be the people that don't understand the difference between image quality and pixel count then.

Real photography demands large sensors and lots of expensive glass.
Camera phones are, at best, devices for casual snapping. Nothing wrong with that. But casual photography does not benefit from more pixels. It needs better low-light performance. They should make photo-sites larger not smaller.

A 12 megapixel sensor, in a phone is about as sensible as a JATO rocket pack on a kids tricycle.
When a phone manufacturer turns to mega-pixellage as their USP, isn't it an indication that they have given up trying to compete on the quality of the phone?

I like a nice car stereo, but it'd be crazy to select a car *because* of the stereo.

C

The iPhone has brought with it an explosion of mobile internet use and an explosion of app purchase and installation. I would say that the reason for that is that Apple made processes that were once the domain of geek "smartphone" users into things that "just a phone" users feel comfortable doing.

I'm constantly hearing about how this phone or that can everything the iPhone can, or do it better, but the figures speak for themselves. What makes the iPhone unique is the huge percentage of iPhone users that actually avail themselves of all of its "features", as opposed to all those phones that ladle on the features so that a small subset of geek users can have bragging rights.

It's true that ease of use is in the eye of the beholder, but the way the typical iPhone user actually uses their iPhone suggests that Apple figured out a way to make using and moving between a broad range of applications far less intimidating and accessible than pretty much everything on the market prior to its release.

And it still appears to me that the response from the industry at large has been mostly to add big touch screens with cool animations, or pad the "features" list, or both, without worrying too much about sweating the details of how, exactly, everything works together.

If you think that "usability" is just a buzz word, or that that a touch screen and animations are all there is to an iPhone, then you're probably not who Apple is trying to sell a phone to. It's likely that any number of phones from other manufacturers will meet your needs.

But Apple's still the one with the wildly disproportionate mobile internet share and the wildly disproportionate app sales. That isn't because iPhone owners have been somehow hypnotized into thinking they "should" use their iPhone indiscriminately for all kinds of things, it's because they get one and discover they can. Pretty much all of them.

Which is what I call "usability."

I was thinking about why a 12 megapixel image was inappropriate for a phone.

As an imagination exercise I took a survey of imaginary cameraphone users in my own imagination:
And I asked them: "What do you do with your cameraphone photographs?"

A good 30% did not use the camera at all.

Of those that do..
100% will look at the photos on the cellphone itself ( Display rez: 0.25M Pixels)
25% will view on a computer (Display rez: 1.5M Pixels)
5% will view the photo on their HD TV (Display rez: 2M Pixels)
1% will view the photo on a "pro" cinema display (Display rez 3M Pixels)
10% will occasionally get 6x4 prints made (Display rez 3M Pixels)
1% will occasionally get 8x10 prints made (Display rez 8M Pixels)
0.0001% will view the image on a real cinema screen (Display rez 2M Pixels)

I am not convinced that 12 megapixels is of much practical benefit. (Other than as a sales trick to fool the technically naive. )

Camera phone pictures are poor, not because of low-resolution but because of bad optics and poor low-light performance.

C.