Camera Phones Considered Harmful*

I’ve posted a new piece over at Mobitopia, entitled Camera Phones Considered Harmful.

*: to serendipitous picture taking

Phone cameras, such as my Nokia 3650 are advertised as being able to let you take pictures quickly, easily, and at those points where you think “Damn, I wish I had a camera with me”, right? At least, that’s what I thought.

Imagine my suprise, then, when last week, en route to the pub to meet with some friends, I spotted a fox wandering through a garden. Now, being a city dweller, it’s not a very common occurrence to see these animals at such close quarters; especially when it has obviously just caught its dinner and is carrying said dead dinner in its jaws.

“I’ll try and get a picture”, thinks I, despite knowing that the quality of the picture would probably be poor since the 3650 doesn’t have a flash. So I whipped the phone out, unlocked the keypad, pressed the right softkey (which I have set to be “Camera”), and waited. And waited.

And waited.

I waited so long, in fact, that the fox had long since noticed me and promptly scarpered.

I was annoyed at missing this photo opportunity, but I was even more annoyed at the ridiculous response time of the camera. Now, I’d noticed that in the past when I was using the camera that the ‘boot’ time of the camera was a bit shoddy, but in those situations the pictures were set-up, not impromptu as this one was, so I hadn’t really bothered that much (although it was still enough to try my patience once in a while).

Next day, I tried an experiment comparing my Pentax Optio S camera against the 3650. (As a side note, the Pentax is actually lighter then the 3650.) I wasn’t all that surprised to discover that the Pentax was ready to take a picture before the 3650 had finished responding to me unlocking the keypad. Now, you could say that I should leave the keypad unlocked; but then I’d run up a massive phone bill due to it making random calls to people as the keypad is bumped around in my pocket.

I’d been growing more and more unhappy with the Series 60 UI over the last few weeks anyway, and this was the last straw. Further evidence was found when my wife asked me for a phone number the other night, and I just handed her the phone. About 30 seconds later she handed me it back saying, “How the hell does that thing work?”. Now, my wife may not be a gadget geek like I am, but when she first used the Palm IIIc I got her a couple of years back, she had no problem. She was adding phone numbers and addresses using Graffiti within the first minute of switching the device on.

The problem is, of course, what else is there? The Treo 600 is probably the nicest one I’ve used, but I don’t have the GSM version of that yet. Over at The Register, Andrew Orlowski this morning posted a great piece wondering Where is the perfect phone UI?, where he writes that he also considers the Treo 600 to be a nice phone UI, but wonders why no-one has yet build a truly smart interface to these so-called smart phones.

A while back, I read a statistic that said that users on phone networks (in the UK) using Nokia handsets sent an average of 36 text messages per month, against an average of 12 messages by Motorola users. As these phones become more complex, the UI itself increases in importance, and I don’t see enough evidence of innovation by the major players at the moment. Why doesn’t the phone industry make like the car industry, but instead of introducing concept handset designs (as they currently do), they should show and publically demonstrate concept interface designs. Imagine how great the N-Gage could have been if only they’d shown it to some people who had a clue?