I don’t laugh at the camera, but the one in my phone isn’t very good. It wouldn’t produce readable screen shots, which is what you can do with yours. That would be very useful. My camera will do HD video, but it is much larger than a phone, and not usually carried.
That’s like multithreading a landing sequence for a drone and not understanding that you need to be sure the vehicle in on the ground before you turn off the engine. [Not that anyone would ever do that… really… trust me… ]
It works for you, so you need it.
]]>BTW, you laugh at the camera. But I’ve found a good use for the camera on my smartphone: Taking movies and photos of Linux kernel panics. As I’m sure you’re aware, Linux kernel panics can be devilish to debug if you’re in front of a box with no network connections for IPMI console and no serial port for KDB over serial. Yesterday, for example, there was a system being manufactured that crashed consistently during system boot, and I was called in to see if it was the new release of the software causing the problem. After taking video of two totally different crashes, one during SAS bus reset and one where the init process died in midstream, and slowly walking through the video of the crashes as they happened, I shook my head and said “Hardware.” Because I know where (and why) the new release crashes, and those two places ain’t it :). (The latest Linux kernels are just *full* of races in the block layer where, if something loses the race, you get a kernel oops as something being deallocated attempts to access something else that’s already been deallocated… who in the world schedules a block device drain tasklet on disk device deallocate where the next step in the process of tearing down a disk drive is going to be to deallocate the block device queue that the tasklet needs in order to drain the device? Madness!).
]]>Mine [LG800G] can do the music and has a camera, but I only need it for the phone because I have other gadgets that are better, and I don’t have to travel like I did in SoCal. A smart phone would have been great back then, but they came out well after I really needed them.
I can see your point, and it makes sense for you. It’s nice to have a choice because no one solution works for everyone.
]]>All the other stuff the phone will do is sort of gravy on top of that meat and potatoes — nice to have, but not why I have it. The above, however, is the holy grail I was yearning for from the moment I first turned on my first Palm Treo — one box that organizes my life, gets me where I’m going, lets me answer my phone calls, and also plays my music (music being important to me, as you might expect from my blog).
]]>The device has a lot of nice design components, but the package is less than the sum of the parts. There were too many last minute tweaks that have created major problems, and too little real-world testing before release.
Oh, that will be Windows 9. With M$ it’s every other version that is worth upgrading to and then, only after Service Pack 1 has been released.
I only use my cellphone to make actual voice calls, although it has a browser and texting capabilities.
]]>Now if Microsoft could only get their act together and create a release of Windows that was worth using. Windows 8 ain’t it — Windows 8 is a forlorn mess (yes, I’ve tried out Windows 8 thanks to MSDN, yes, our software runs on the “classic” mode of Windows 8, no, I have absolutely no desire to use Windows 8 on a daily basis because it is a kludge on top of a kludge).
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