At what point in history did the camera become the most important on a new smartphones spec sheet? Don’t get me wrong here, I love a decent camera phone, but increasingly I’m seeing manufacturers chase the “best camera ever” type of tagline and other specs or form factors are being neglected. Mainly the design.
Recent devices from the big manufacturers have all been about the camera, take the HTC One X and One S event last year, any event involving Nokia, the HTC One event this year, the Galaxy unpacked events, even the annual iPhone event. They all go on about how good the camera is. Yes having a decent camera is worthy of a mention but why is it the only thing they care about?
For me I like a solid device, a device that sounds great, looks great, has some unique hardware and software features, maybe it has a quirky form factor. All of these things would be nice to see these new devices. All well we seem to get year in year out is a slab of glass and plastic or metal stuck together.
What happened to specific gaming handhelds like the Xperia Play? What happened to music orientated phones like we used to have years ago? What happened to qwerty keyboards? Or flip phones? Or a device with an enormous battery pack? I guess my problem is larger than just cameras, it’s form factors as a whole.
I guess that the manufacturers have done extensive market research actually asking consumers what they want and they were met with a reply of:
“I want a great big phone, with a great big camera and nothing else matters”
In this day and age so many of the manufacturers are struggling financially and to push out a quirky device that no one would buy could be suicidal. So I guess I should just shut up and deal with the fact that camera phones are king and that I’m NEVER EVER going to get my 5″ qwerty version of the Note 3.
How about you guys? Do you want a camera phone and nothing else? Or is there some long lost feature you wish would make a return? Let us know below, not that I can fix it for you, I’m just intrigued to see if I’m alone here.
I think that the developments in smart phones in recent years has meant that specific phones are not required, take for example music phones, now every HTC has Beatsaudio so there is no point in having a specific music phone as how would it improve it? The camera is the current fad where a phone manufacture can differentiate their device from competitors, this will change in 6 months when the next development comes out
As Mark said on a podcast a while back, the screen is your main interaction with the phone, therefore that’s of massive importance. For me it’s the highest importance. Poor screen? No sale!
I’d be happy if my phone didn’t have a camera; I rarely use it – I tried out my Xperia Z’s camera once, but I’m not interested.
A better screen would be useful, though.
I actually disagree slightly because galaxy s came out with 5mpx while others like Sony were already on 8mpx. S2 had 8mpx when some had 12mpx and so forth. Win mobile by Nokia is the one with this worrying trend trying to over compensate for the shortfalls of win mobile. The OS itself isn’t great so Nokia is trying to sway the customer with impressive camera specs and modules. Htc One had a 4mpx camera which i find abysmal and its a flagship. So point the finger at nokia here i think. Htc titan 2 tried and failed and now lumia 1020 is trying again