Concern for usability and ergonomics

Ian Stirling OpenMoko at mauve.plus.com
Tue Jun 12 01:30:54 CEST 2007


Kito Berg-Taylor wrote:
> While I don't agree with several points in your post, I'll just point 
> out some that have been refuted in the past.

> Regarding the camera, there have been several people who have pointed 
> out that cameras are not welcome in many places, and the number of 
> people who would rather not have a camera on their phone is surprisingly 
> large. Of course it applies the other way too, as there are many people 
> who are very vocal about their desire for a camera with an 
> ever-increasing MP count. As someone who actually does photography as a 
> hobby, I find myself in the former category due to the eternally abysmal 
> performance of cameras small enough to fit in a phone.

I would like a 15MP 5* optical zoom lens with a nice flash - but that's 
not happening without devoting considerable money and volume to it.

For many applications, when you are not taking the pictures as a 'hobby' 
  - or rather, when you're not taking photos for the purposes of other 
people admiring them, often surprisingly 'bad' cameras can be of use.
640*480 can take perfectly adequate snaps of buisness cards, reminders 
of which screw goes where when dissasembling stuff, snaps of people to 
use as icons in PIM apps, recording the width of a crack in a wall to 
check for later movement, snaps of stuff when shopping so you don't have 
to remember prices for later comparison, tagging for openstreetmap, 
reading barcodes, gesture interfaces, ...
Simple VGA cameras, perhaps with a tiny 1W LED as a flash/flashlight can 
be really quite small indeed.



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