.Dust

I always read Michael Garten­berg blog with great inter­est and I find myself agree­ing on his views most of the times.

In his last take (that you can read by click­ing on this link) Michael makes a com­par­i­son between a high end cam­era phone (Nokia N95) and a DSL cam­era (Canon DS800).

As you can expect there is no com­pe­ti­tion at all from a tech­ni­cal standpoint:

• Startup and shut­ter lag are much higher on the Nokia n95. This does not sound strange, at the end of the day the Nokia N95 still have to per­form his duty of phone while the user takes a picture.
• Flash is bet­ter on the DSL camera.
• Lens and Zoom are supe­rior in the DSL camera.
• Image sta­bi­liza­tion and face detec­tion are avail­able only on the DSL camera.

So it seems that the DSL cam­era is the clear win­ner of this competition.

This is a test that I would have liked to do by myself, but I think that Michael got the same results I would expect from such a test.

Given this it seems that ded­i­cated devices will always be bet­ter that multi-​purpose device. A DSL cam­era will always be be bet­ter that the best cam­era phone avail­able on the mar­ket. Almost true.

I think that it will also depend on what use the cus­tomer will make of his pic­tures and how much for him the “time to friends” is crit­i­cal. If you want to point, shoot and send the cam­era phone will be the winner.

I think that tech­nol­ogy is ready for a new range of devices. Why can’t a DLS cam­era be a phone or, at least, offer some fea­tures of the phone like data con­nec­tion to upload and share your images?

If we look at what tech­nol­ogy has to offer we have two options available:

• Inte­grate a phone mod­ule in the DSL camera.
• Let the cam­era com­mu­ni­cate with your phone to use it as a modem. (Blue­tooth here seems to be the most viable solu­tion today)

The first option will be much more expen­sive than the sec­ond one, also requir­ing some more effort into reg­u­la­tory stuff. (e.g. in Italy every mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tion device has to be reg­is­tered to a very well iden­ti­fied cus­tomer. In this case it can­not be an off the shelf product).

Tech­nol­ogy mash-​up is the next big thing. Nowa­days phone mod­ule are small enough to be inte­grated in almost every con­sumer elec­tronic prod­uct avail­able on the mar­ket with a price still quite high but with a clear trend to lower in the future.

Man­u­fac­turer should try to start think­ing about this kind of hybrid devices. They will have a mar­ket for sure.

On the other side mobile oper­a­tor should start to think at ded­i­cated data plans for these kind of devices. We do not want to have mul­ti­ple sub­scrip­tions for every device we own. As cus­tomers we may want to have data enabled only copies of our SIMs to be placed in the hybrid device shar­ing the same plan we are using on our mobile phone.

Con­ver­gence in some way is not only in tech­nol­ogy but also in the area that brings your device to live.

Who will coör­di­nate this kind of effort is a good ques­tion to ask.

Why do I blog this? I think that con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of con­sumer elec­tron­ics devices with mobile is the next thing we should look at very closely.

Related posts:

1. Device mor­ph­ing
2. Con­trol your home from your mobile phone
3. Cables in a wire­less world
4. The def­i­n­i­tion of Smartphone
5. Shall we write about iPhone ? Well, yes!