Yesterday I spent about 45 minutes playing around with an iPhone at an Apple store in Bethesda, Md. about a five minute walk from my house. It’s a “boutique” store (i.e., much, much, much smaller than a typical Apple store) but it had plenty of demo iPhones so I didn’t have any problem testing all the features, including taking photos with its two megapixel camera.
Because the phone was attached with a cable to the table, I didn’t have much leeway but I was able to take enough photos to get a pretty good idea of the images’ quality — when used in a brightly lit room.
(Note to cellular operators: What percentage of the phones in your retail stores are “dummy” phones that don’t work? Just how pleasant do you think it is for potential customers to pick up a phone and realize it’s a non-working hunk of plastic? Just how useful do you think non-working phones are in “selling themselves” to consumers? But I digress….)
Here are half a dozen photos taken with an iPhone:
Same resolution via cellular or iTunes
Since I was in the store I wasn’t able to directly upload the photos via iTunes to my computer. So I used the store’s WiFi connection to e-mail the photos to a Gmail account and then opened them on my desktop computer.
I had read somewhere on the Web that iPhone photos sent via AT&T/Cingular would be reduced to a lower resolution. However, I spoke with sales people at about half a dozen Apple stores and they all said the resolution would be the same whether photos were sent to an e-mail account via wireless or transferred via iTunes.
In any case, I sent them to myself via WiFi. So, the photos I’ve posted here shouldn’t have been reduced (the limitations of viewing them on your computer’s screen notwithstanding).
Easy peasy
I’ve read about a million articles about the iPhone and watched all the Apple videos so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect before ever touching it. But even if I hadn’t done so much research, using the camera is about easy as it could be.
One reason for the ease of use is, of course, Apple’s wonderful graphical user interface. Another reason is because the camera doesn’t have many features, even features that are common in other phones, as I’ve previously written.
You can e-mail a photo (no MMS capability), designate it as the phone’s wallpaper, attach it to a contact name so it pops up when a call comes in, delete and, well, that’s about it. The photos are kept in an album that as you’ve probably seen is a cinch to use.
There’s no dedicated hardware key to press the shutter. You touch a camera icon on the middle of the screen to take a photo. It worked okay for me, but I think a dedicated hardware button makes it easier to take photos and to hold the camera steady in certain circumstances.
Photo quality
The photo quality seems about average for today’s two megapixel camera phones. Under good lighting conditions, the images should be fine for many uses, including printing a 4” x 6” snapshot.
I didn’t use the iPhone under poor lighting conditions but according to all the reviews I’ve read (such as here), poor lighting equals poor photos. To be fair, that’s typically the case with most, if not all, camera phones, and many digital cameras don’t always do well either.
Two megapixel camera phones can take very interesting and artistic images if you know what you’re doing. Indeed, even a good 1.3 megapixel camera phone can produce art.
Not for me…..yet
Because this a camera phone weblog and also because there have been so many other articles about the iPhone, I won’t spend time discussing its other features. Personally, it’s not yet for me, although I love its 3.5” screen and I really like its Web browsing capabilities (but not without some problems) and photo album GUI.
My primary phone is a BlackBerry 8300 “Curve” and I often carry a second phone, such as the Nokia N95 five megapixel camera phone (both of which have been provided to me by their respective manufacturers but which also are best-of-breed for their capabilities — e-mail for the 8300 and the camera for the N95).
I can’t see giving up the 8300 any time soon because I’m one of those e-mailholics and 8300 is so great for that. But for fancy multimedia applications I could see the iPhone becoming my “secondary” phone when it offers more power-user features. Perhaps next year.
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