Return of the bananaphone

Motorola has launched a new phone that resurects the old bananaphone shape, but with a twist: when closed, it is an ordinary candybar shape. Only when you slide the keyboard out, does the phone morph into a curve that is said to fit your face better.
It is very cool and bound to be another fashion winner for Moto. But for cameraphone fans, it is a bit of a let down as it rates just 2 megapixels. What a pity.

Do megapixels really count?

David Pogue has been having a swipe at megapixel mania, in an article called Breaking the Myth of Megapixels in the New York Times. Beyond about 5MP, picture quality does not get much better and you get all sorts of other problems, Pogue rightly points out. He even does a couple of tests showing that the average person in the street can't distinguish between pictures taken at 7MP, 10MP and a massive 16.7MP. The method used to take the images is open to criticism but he makes a valid point.
So I thought I would take a little test of my own to see what difference pixel count makes on mobile phones.
I took the Nokia N73 that I have on trial, and assembled a little still life (quite Baroque, I think). Then I took three shots, moving out each time and using the digital zoom to frame the same shot. The digital zoom does not actually zoom at all - all it does is select the middle of the image and blow it up to fit the screen, so the resolution effectively goes down by several notches. Unfortunately, I can't tell exactly how much from the manual.The first image is really quite good. Lots of detail and nice colour, considering it was taken by the light of the dining room and the phone's flash. Cameraphones still suffer badly in low light:The second is visibly not as good but still acceptable if you are partially sighted:
The third is what professional photographers call complete pants (but still better than any VGA crapcam:
One of the things about digital images is that you can instantly blow them up to any magnification to examine every little flaw. So I printed all the images out on 6x4 photo paper. Interestingly, the full resolution image was only a bit better than the one taken with the digital zoom at the halfway point. The full digital zoom image was still pants. As ever, the quality depends on the medium to a great degree.
Clearly, cameraphones have some way to go before 'megapixels don't matter'. Cameraphones also have a harder job than 'proper' digital cameras because the lenses are so much smaller and optical zooms are rare.
The advice at the moment has to be never to use the digital zoom unless you want to send the image directly from the phone to your blog or a friend. If you are going to download the picture to a PC, take it at full resolution and edit the image on the PC.

Lenses made of water and oil?

It sounds bizarre, but liquid lenses could be the future of cameraphones. They have been proposed for ages, by Philips among others, but French company Varioptic and Chinese optical company Sunny have produced a module that they hope will appear in cameraphones soon.
Liquid lenses work by holding a drop of oil inside a metal ring, held in place by water. When a voltage is applied to the ring, the water is drawn along it to compress the oil into a spherical droplet - that is, a lens.
Varying the voltage instantly changes the shape of the oil droplet, changing the focal length. Both autofocus and zoom lenses are possible.
The advantages of using liquid are very small size and high speed compared with mechanical arrays. They are also cheap.
The Varioptic module is only 2MP, so it will not be competing with the top glass lens systems. Recent experience has shown that cameraphones can only compete with regular cameras by using top quality lenses, glass rather than plastic, so it will be interesting to see if liquid lenses rule the world or become a cheapo alternative for happy-snappy phones.

Is it a phone? Is it a laptop? Is it a camera?

I've long felt that cameraphones are going to morph in two directions - phones with cameras and cameras with phones. Here's a third alternative - a micro-laptop with a phone. From HTC, which supplies most of the networks with smartphones, the HTC Advantage is a tablet-style computer with a 5in diagonal screen. As shown, it plugs into a keyboard so you can easily type documents, and the touch screen allows easy navigation.
The camera on this side is a tv quality camera for making video calls, but the other side sports a 3MP camera. This is a really powerful combination - you can really see your images properly on the 5in screen, though there is no indication whether you can do any useful editing before uploading.
The unit is a full 3G phone, with HSDPA, Bluetooth and WiFi, so the photoblogger is fully equipped for any connection on offer. The HTC Advantage should be available in March with T-Mobile under the Ameo brand.

Samsung's 5 megapixel phone

The current 'norm' for a decent cameraphone is a 3.2MP resolution. But that is set to go up to 5MP very soon, when phones such as Nokia's N95 and Samsung's amazing Ultra Smart F700 arrive.
The F700 has a huge 2.8in touch screen and a slide-out keypad similar to several recently-launched smartphones.
In theory, it should be a photoblogger's dream - very high quality images from the 5MP camera, some basic picture editing, plus relatively easy typing.
It will be fascinating to try one. The main fear is that the 5MP images will actually be a step backwards. Packing so many pixels into a limited area of silicon can allow neighbouring pixels to interfere with each other, a process known as crosstalk, which can cause fuzziness. And very high resolution can simply expose lens defects, which is why the major phone manufacturers have been sourcing their optics from leading lens makers such as Schneider and Leica recently.
The massive amounts of data in a 5MP image could also pose problems when uploading via the mobile networks, which is likely to be time-consuming and very expensive. The phone supports the new HSDPA high speed download system, but that doesn't help with uploads. No WiFi either, so you can't even find a hotspot and upload from there.
And the phone is a beast of a thing to carry around. Must get one to try out later this year - they should be in the shops mid-year.

Samsung's Thinphone

Samsung has launched a phone it claims is the world's thinnest, at under 6mm, and it also packs a 3MP camera. At last, a cameraphone that slips into a pocket without what Harold Steptoe memorably described as "unsawtly bulges in ver trahzers".
Unfortunately, the phone is not 3G so uploading pictures to your blog will take a while, and frequent upload may be necessary because it has no memory card slot (though it does have a generous 70 megabyte built-in memory).

Place your pictures by satellite

The Nokia 6110 Navigator phone announced today has satellite navigation built in. For most, this means finding your way without having to bother with maps, which is clinically proven to rot the brain. But the phone also has a 2MP camera, so you can add GPS coordinates and even the direction the camera is pointing to each shot when you upload it to your blog. The disadvantage might be that it would give your stalker a trail to follow.....

Nokia updates the Communicator - with camera

Mobiles for business have traditionally been camera-free because employers don't want to tool up their staff for industrial espionage, but everyone demands cameras so the security guys have had to retreat. The latest convert is Nokia's shiny new E90 Communicator, the latest in the company's long line of phones that look like tiny laptops. For the first time, the E90 has a camera, and it is a good one at 3.2 megapixels. The phone itself looks good too, with a bright, high resolution screen that can be folded part-way back or flat, depending on how you like to use it. The phone also has High Speed Data Packet Access (HSDPA) built in, which will offer higher speed downloads.

I went out for a walk round Selsey today and took a few snaps of the railway carriage cottages with the Nokia N73. The combination of aa 3.2 megapixel sensor and Carl Zeiss lens is giving excellent results.
Back in the 1920s, a cheap way of getting a holiday home by the sea was to buy a condemned carriage from the Southern Railway, take it off its bogies, tow it down to the beach on a cart and stand it on a few brick pillars. The N73 took some great pics, despite light that would have had the England team sprinting back to the pavillion.
The Green Bungalow (left) still has 'SMOKING' etched into the window.


Santos (right) looks as though it is just about to arrive at Platform 3, all stations to Portsmouth Harbour not calling at Hilsea Halt.
Take a look at the sky behind - most of the cameraphones I have tried until now would have rendered those clouds as a uniform grey mush.
The N73 is, for the first time, as good a camera as any 35mm snappy-snaps job. It's a pretty good phone too.

More CyberShot phones

Sony Ericsson has updated its CyberShot range of cameraphones with the K810. It is a 3G phone with a 3.2 megapixel camera, coupled with a xenon zoom which should improve the ability to take clear, sellable pictures of footballers doing naughty things in dark nightclubs.

Built in picture blogging will enable shots to be uploaded directly to your blog. It also has BestPic, which starts taking pictures as soon as you press the button part-way. When you push the button all the way, it displays four shots before and four shots after your image, so you can choose the one that captures the instant you wanted.
3.2 megapixels is becoming the norm for cameraphones and not a moment too soon.

OK, it's been a while. Idleness has prevailed. But I have been lent a Nokia N73 and it has inspired me to get going again. Other inspirations include the need to pay a whacking great tax bill (thank you, Adam Hart-Davis! May your earth closet explode!).
I picked up the N73 last week and was overcome by how cool I was again. Until I ostentatiously pulled it out on the train and started installing my email settings, and this other guy hauled his out and he had obviously had it for weeks.
Anyway first impressions are that it is brilliant.
This morning, the dawn rose and there was not a cloud in the sky. What there was quite a lot of, however, was the vapour trails of the thousand and one economy jets that take off from Gatwick and Heathrow early on Sunday morning, gather over my house and fly off in a great relay race to the south. There was more vapour trail than sky. And the N73 caught it brilliantly.

By midday, however, grey had set in with a vengeance and and the weather was as cold and dull as Basingstoke on a bank holiday Monday. The 3.2 megapixel camera still caught every nuance of greyness when I went rowing at Bosham.