...more recent posts
Mobileburn has an article, with lots of pictures, comparing the output of some 1 megapixel camera phones. The phones are the Sony Ericsson S700i, the Siemens S65, and the Motorola V710, with some extra shots from the Nokia 7610 and the Sharp GX30 thrown in at the end.
The Motorola definitely proves that more pixels don't always equal good pictures. The others do a pretty good job though. The S700 seems particularly good. Of course now I can't wait for the 2 megapixel untis shipping in the 2nd half of 2005.
I have been eagerly awaiting the debut of the Treo 650 cellphone. It has been officially announced, but isn't on sale yet. The big disappointment with the specs is that the camera did not increase in resolution. It's still just a VGA (about 1/3 of a megapixel.) When I first heard this I thought it was a deal breaker and I started to look for other possible phones (more on that later,) but now I am not so sure. It may turn out that the sheer number of pixels the camera can resolve is not the only factor.
Palm (who makes the Treo,) said they had planned to include a 1+ megapixel sensor, but could not find one that operated well in low light conditions. As the owner of a Treo 600, I can say that this was that cameras greatest failing. It is basically useless when not in bright sunlight. So Palm stuck with the VGA sensor, but they say it is different, and that the second generation VGA sensors, combined with a new lens, and new software, make for a better camera than the first generation 1 megapixel sensors that are out now.
Here are some side by side comparisons of pictures from the 600 and 650. It really does seem much improved. And the 650 shoots very small videos as well.
Now I am back to undecided. Certainly seems very usable.
Still working on the new layout. Not that I care too much, but I am trying to use my page to learn non table based CSS design. I made something I really liked, but then it turns out that it is completely borked in IE. So I dropped back to this non-design for the moment.
This is the madness of designing for browsers. It's not as bad as it used to be (specifically because you can safely forget about the hell that was Navigator 4,) but it is still a pain. For anything but the most simple design you probably have to do some browser sniffing and serve up different CSS files for different browsers/platforms. That is a change I had sort of wanted to make anyway (putting the CSS into a separate file rather than including it inline,) but it will be a slightly more involved operation to do it this way.
Yeah, I know, pretty interesting...