Giving the zoom a workout

Went to Monkey World over the half-term, and jolly nice it is too. The keepers give talks at regular intervals, which were interesting and also demonstrated their expertise and commitment to the animals.
Taking pictures in a zoo is a big test for a cameraphone because the subjects tend to be a long way away and don't hold a pose very long.
The N93's optical zoom was very impressive, but the rest of the system wasn't really up to the job, clever as it is. The camera waits for the image to sharpen and then fires the 'shutter' (with a satisfying if bogus click). At long ranges, this can cause a wait of a second or more, by which time the wretched monkey has turned its head or leapt off or something. As with all cameras, focusing on the netting or glass was a problem.
The fact that many of the monkeys seemed to congregate in dark corners did not help - as with all cameraphones, performance rapidly decays as the light goes.
However, when I got lucky some decent images resulted. And I was not alone - there were lots of phones being used among the SLRs with long lenses around.

Will phones kill the iPod?

Yes, in a word. Before going away for the weekend I loaded the radio programmes I had missed onto the N93, to catch up in the car. The audio is brilliant, and I could take calls simply by pressing the accept button on the dongle on the headphones. So simple.
The big limitation was memory. Over the weekend I took quite a large number of pictures and a couple of short videos and had to start deleting MP3s fairly early on.
On the other hand, I have just bought a 1 gigabyte SD card on eBay for just £18 including postage, so flash memory is clearly coming down in price very fast. I give the iPod another year, max.
So what will Apple do? The last effort to create an iPod phone, the Motorola Rokr, was a complete CROK, with deliberately crippled playback capabilities and all the style of a Mars bar. Apple probably can't break into the mobile phone market on its own - it is a maverick and the telecoms sector values cooperation above all. And the mobile networks want to operate their own iTunes and don't see why Apple should get a look-in.