Is it a cameraphone or phonecamera.....

[Ricardodaforce]

......ask engadget. Some interesting stuff coming out of CES this year. This effort from Polaroid fuses a smartphone with an optical zoom-toting camera. The most popular camera on Flickr is actually a mobile, and maybe innovations like this are good for encouraging more people to have an interest in photography.

 

[Spoony]

That is one funky looking phone; it would be great to have a camera on my phone which is half decent.

 

[deadkenny]

I'm getting very impressed by the processing capabilities on phones now. Sure these things can be done on computer but as an example the 'Action Shot' feature on the Samsung Galaxy S2 (possibly a standard Android thing? not sure) impressed me as you just point and it tracks moving action then does a bunch of stitching and presents you with multi-exposure action shot and if you pan the camera it will stitch it as a panorama at the same time. More impressive is all it's basically point and touch and takes a second to process!

Quality is limited, but put that kind of power in an SLR and we'd have impressive kit and far less fiddling on the PC side. Same kind of shot would take me hours to process on a PC!

Of course a phone like that has a dual core 1ghz processor or something like that! Battery for that would be shot fast on an SLR.

 

[Rob 80386]

I think i've just seen my next upgrade

seriously though, thats impressive, esp if it has a decent battery life, one would never need to carry a compact again

 

[farrance]

Polaroid does have it's name in the photography community but unfortunately apple has it's talons in a much bigger community. Everyone else.

The best thing about this phone will be the camera, by far. It'll be like the photographers walkman. However, the worst thing about this phone will be the phone. I've lived with android for 2 years now, I can't stand it. Every day that has gone past the quality and performance has deteriorated past a point that's even useful.

But yes, bloody impressive tech. I'd love for polaroid to hit into the phone market, especially if they offer cheap photo printing too.

 

[deadkenny]

Android isn't the problem when it comes to calls, it's the manufacturers. Apple have the same problem as they had far less experience making proper phones, and frankly still aren't that good at it. Nokia is where it's at if you want decent calls. Sadly Symbian has dragged along slowly in the shadow of Android and iOS and now been sentenced to death by Windows Phone. Still Win Phone Nokia's will still make decent calls. They also have good cameras, though recent years they've been obsessed with the dreaded EDoF cameras which are truly an abomination to photography.