Poll: Camera phones versus real cameras

Lifehacker is running an interesting read poll on its website - Do you use your camera phone or your digital camera to take most of your pictures?

So far the majority of Lifehacker’s readers are not using their camera phone for serious photography. Instead, they find their camera handy to quickly grab snapshots of everyday situations where they don’t have their digital cameras at hand. Camera phones can be quite useful for those of you who don’t carry a digital camera around or to send a picture to another cell phone.

Sample picture taken with my Motorola RAZR V3c (San Jose Convention Center)

The quality of a camera phone is not very good in general, and it’s not just about the megapixels - cell phones are made very compact and can’t house a very large digital sensor. The lens on a camera phone is also of quite low quality, which can further increase the blurriness of a picture.

Until I read that poll, I didn’t realize I was carrying a camera phone with me all the time. While the image quality is not very good, it is still useful to grab pictures of friends and various events. A low quality picture is better than no picture at all.

As cell phones become more and more powerful, they can run bigger applications. Square Enix, mainly known for its franchise Final Fantasy, has adapted a version of the Final Fantasy I video game to the cellular phone!

The Final Fantasy mobile version is actually based on the Game Boy Advance version, which features higher quality graphics and new dungeons. The game is very intuitive and easy to play on a cell phone. The developers have also added a quick save option, so you don’t have to play for hours before reaching the next save point.

Fans of Final Fantasy like me will be sure to stay tuned for the release of this game later this year.

Via: E3 2006: Final Fantasy I Hands-On

ATI, a big player in the video card industry, has recently announced a new partnership with Nokia in order to add multimedia value to mobile phones. This will allow, among other things, Nokia cell phones to run 3D games and provide better mobile TV and music playback.

“With a shared vision of how multimedia impacts the mobile market, Nokia and ATI are providing much needed direction and a framework to move the whole industry forward.?? -Paul Dal Santo, Vice President and GM, Handheld Products, ATI.

This is one more step towards a unified device, combining portable media players to your cell phone.

Sources: ATI and Nokia Partner and ATI, Nokia collaborate for offering ultimate Mobile Multimedia Experiences

Nowadays, the average cellular phone comes with an electronic calendar, an alarm clock, a digital camera, video games and even the ability to play back digital audio files such as MP3s. This makes the cell phone a serious competitor to portable MP3 players, like Apple’s iPod.

The biggest advantage the iPod has over cell phones at the moment is storage space. The iPod can have a hard drive of up to 60GB, allowing about 15000 songs to be stored on the device. Most mobile phones support flash memory cards, which usually have less than 1GB. However, cell phones with hard disks are becoming more common. This allows for more pictures, videos and songs to be stored on the phone. Will this new fad mark the end of the iPod?

Apple has already foreseen this turn-around. The latest versions of the iPod are now able to play video files. In fact, the computer giant is already looking at combining it’s iPod to a mobile phone.

Will the iPod be able to survive in the mobile phone market? Be it one way or another, in the end, your will probably have the equivalent of all the electronics you can find in a household - in your pocket.

Inspired of: Cell Phones’ Hard Drives Could Doom MP3 Players

“Sometimes real life can get pretty boring. Waking up, brushing your teeth, going to school… it’s so mundane. Now you can liven up that commute by accessing a virtual life on your cell phone, Sims 2 by Electronic Arts is going mobile. There are going to be two versions of the game available: the regular ol’ Sims 2 and the Connected Edition.”

From Sims 2 offers virtual life on cell phone

I’ve never been a fan of The Sims but I’m curious as to how complex this game can get on a cellular phone before hitting technical limitations.

“AirPlay Network, a startup based in San Francisco, is launching a suite of games that are tied to live television shows. By signing up, you can predict what is going to happen on Monday Night Football, who is going to be the next American Idol, or what the correct answer is to that vexing question on Jeopardy!”

Read the rest at Cell phone and TV interact

TG Daily has an article on cellular games. They talked to the developers of “24″, a game from the popular TV show. Being a game programmer myself, here are some facts from the article I’ve found interesting:

1. Development time is typically between 7 and 9 months - With about 1/3 for development time, and 2/3 for adapting the game to run on the various cellular phones out there. A cell phone game has to be converted into 1000 unique builds to support more than 100 carriers around the world!
2. The average game weights around 150 kilobytes - In order to achieve this, developers often have to cut down on game content to make the game fit on cell phones with less memory, sometimes offering low-end versions of the game featuring less gameplay.
3. Small screen size - Game creators must create the gameplay on a very small screen, when compared to console video games.
4. Typical cellular games cost around $5 - The games are usually downloaded through your provider’s interface, meaning you can’t just go to EB Games and buy a copy of your favorite game; you have to wait for your provider to offer it.
5. A typical cellular game costs between $200000 and $500000 to make - A XBox360 or Playstation3 game is reported to cost between 10 and 25 million to make.