Smartphone folderol

[rebeccmeister]

I'm a bit terrified of what might happen if I bring this up, but it's going to happen sooner or later, so I'd best buck up and get over it, I suppose.

I'm smartphone shopping.

My main goal is to consolidate multiple gadgets into one thing (see: previous entry and "unitaskers"). For instance: I've been reasonably satisfied with my Canon Powershot A620, but I keep dropping it*. Ideally, I'd wind up with a smartphone with a non-obnoxious camera that provides some degree of manual control, reasonable image quality, and adequate macro photos.

Another thing, though, is that I still feel strongly about open-source software, so scrottie got me looking at the current main Firefox option, the ZTE Open C. I explicitly do not want to be syncing my computer to a phone, and I don't like what's happened with Apple and its "App Store" nonsense and Google and its Googly-eyed junk.

Anyway, blargh. I will probably be stuck in "decision paralysis" for a while longer yet. Or perhaps I will go back to drawing more pictures of things, and writing more letters, casting off the electronics entirely.


*This is kind of a critical thing, actually. I drop my phone on a regular basis. I drop the camera less frequently, but I still drop it. Shortly after our house was burgled, sytharin gave me a small point-and-shoot digital camera to replace the Canon PowerShot A80 that had broken and then gotten burgled (take that, stupid burglars! Seriously, they stole multiple broken electronics. Joke was on them, for being my electronics recyclers). A week later, I dropped it and it died. The PowerShot A620 is battered, but has survived a lot of dropping trauma. My current cell-o-phone also survives the droppings very well indeed. Also, I hate fussing with specialized battery systems - the PowerShot uses rechargeable AA's.

Comments

FWIW...

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

Nokia's Lumia 1020 has an impressively large sensor and a huge number of pixels (41Mpix). I mention it because its camera is pure "digital zoom", that is, it simply crops out smaller and smaller hunks of the image to give the impression of a zooming out. That means the optical train has only one moving part (the focusing lens) and so should be relatively resistant to being dropped.

Digital zoom usually gives awful results, but because this camera has so many pixels, it should work reasonably well. Even a 2x "digital zoom" still leaves a ~10Mpix image. By comparison, my current "serious" camera has 16Mpix, and I managed perfectly well with a 12Mpix DSLR for some years.