Is the iPhone 3GS enough to make me converge again?
By Ben Robinson on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 1:14 PM PST In Apple, Convergence
Yes, so the iPhone 3GS is out now, and it is featuring a better camera, and video capability, as we all know. But here’s the question – are the capabilities in respect of those features enough? And by enough, I mean comparable to other devices, and satisfactory to people generally? Let’s check them out one by one:
Camera (stills)
The iP3GS is rocking a 3MP camera, which is probably the minimum I would want to see in a camera-phone. Interestingly, the Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) K800i only had a 3.2MP camera, but it took some of the best pictures I’ve seen from a mobile device – easily trumping 5MP models (and some 8MP!) that were released later. So Apple (NSDQ: AAPL)’s 3MP could be enough, especially if the post-processing they talk about is as funky as it sounds.
Right now though, I carry around a slim Casio Exilim (one of my DIvergence devices), which totes a 7MP sensor – the reason being because under some conditions, my current iPhone (3G)’s camera just isn’t good enough. Apart from it’s low 2MP resolution, it copes very badly with artificial light, and any kind of focus!
So, does the Apple iPhone 3GS camera do enough to make it worth leaving my camera at home?
Now let’s consider the next part of the equation:
Video
If I read it right, the iPhone 3GS will capture video at VGA resolution, and I’d guess that will be 24 or 30 fps. However, we’ve seen VGA video capture from a LOT of devices now. One that stands out in my mind was the original Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N95, a class-leader in it’s time. Of course, the iPhone 3GS will allow on-board editing (apparently).
For me, I carry a Flip Mino HD for video-capture convenience, recording at 720p resolution, for up to an hour on it’s 4GB of memory.
So, does the Apple iPhone 3GS video recorder have enough to make it worth leaving the mini-camcorder at home?
It’s a tricky one, isn’t it – the iPhone doesn’t excel in it’s technical capabilities, at least as far as camera and video recorder go – but you can bet it will be easy to use, and provide decent, if not astounding, quality. Then again, it does have the benefit of being one device, as opposed to three, all of which need charging and managing!
What to do, what to do…..? 
Video recording at 30fps in VGA resolution. That’s cool and all, but a lot of smartphones can do that these days. What’s really cool is that Apple announced auto-focus for the video camera!
It’s not clear if the video camera will continually auto-focus while recording, or if it will only auto-focus the frame when at the beginning of a recording session.
The new iPhones will only be free on the £75=$122tariff on an 18 month contract length in the UK
On business tariffs, customers will have to sign up to 24 and 36-month contracts
Well thats says it all the only is firmwire upgrade or ?
a real poor 3mp camera , no frontcamera , about 3-5 years behind the other smartphones . My thoughts is , this was the last iphone sold in 2009.
The whole cell phone megapixel race is absurd. I design scientific cameras for a living, and at conferences we end up laughing about the detectors they put in cell phones. The pixels are so small that the limiting noise is from the tiny number of photons that each one gets. Well that and each pixel has a set amount of noise, so when you up the pixels, you up the noise and just split the same number of photons between them. I guess I say we laugh because I don’t know how those poor cell phone engineers even manage to get an image out of them. It’s entirely driven by marketing at the cell phone companies which push impressively large numbers instead of image quality — I know of one major sensor company that has quit working with cell phone companies because of this. With the typical lenses and sensors available, a full frame dSLR can probably deliver something over 20 megapixels of real resolution. A typical point and shoot is probably in the ballpark of 5. A typical cell phone? I seriously doubt it’s even 2 megapixels. Anything significantly over that just means it has to do more processing on worse data and eats up more memory. A cell phone camera with a resolution over 2-3 megapixels would make me less likely to buy it.
Apple quality i can always trust! We can leave other 2 at home!