Tony <t...@nospam.net> wrote:
> To each his own... But...
Exactly.
> Gene Jones wrote:
> >> No 3G
> > kills battery life, WiFi is much faster and more common / free.
> I tether my phone to either my laptop or a Nokia N800 frequently..
Wish my Blackberry could do that.
> >> No user-replaceable battery
>
> > Incorrect, it's $20 for a user to replace the iPhone battery
>
> Doesn't it require the user to send the phone in to Apple, and then pay
> for a rental iPhone if they cannot be without one for more than 10 days?
> or has Apple changed their stance on it? I did say 'user-replaceable'...
I've done ~$20 battery replacements on iPods...its not that hard, even
though its not consider to be "User" replaceable. Some "Batteries
Plus" franchise stores already offer iPod battery swaps (some while-u-
wait), so I'd expect them to expand their services to iPhones by the
time that they're coming out of warranty, and may similarly in some
areas be a while-u-wait service.
> >> Restrictive terms of use...
> > ? Use is the exact same as any smartphone.
>
> Not if you purchase an unlocked phone.. Granted, in the US, that means
> I can use either ATT or T-Mobile, or a few other smaller independent
> providers... but it is still a choice..
Kind of sounds like a silly option within the USA: "Be locked onto
AT&T or be unlocked and still on AT&T" :-) In general, I'd be more
concerned about the phone's free features being lobotimized by the
cellular provider to increase their service fees based profits (see:
Verizon); YMMV.
> >> 2 Megapixel Camera
>
> > Megapixels have little to do with image quality, the Lens in the iPhone
> > is higher grade than most any smartphone or cellphone.
>
> Megapixels/Image Quality.. really depends on what you want to do
> with the image... my cell phone (5MP/Carl Zeiss Lens) takes
> awesome pictures, but I do not use it to take family portraits..
That may be so, but its missing the point. The point is that for a
given chip size, the more pixels you cram onto it, the fewer photons
are available with which to integrate your signal, and the worse your
S/N ratio becomes: the trade-off is more pixels but with more noise,
versus fewer pixels with less noise.
What's been learned is that the noise levels are generally low and
okay up to a point, and then they go to hell. At what specific MP
count this happens depends on the size of the chip. From what I've
read, the S/N acceptability limit appears to be around 25-35MP for
fullframe dSLRs, 12-16MP for crop body dSLRs, the 7-10MP range for
most Point&Shoot digitals, and for cellphones, the limit's at around
4-5MP.
Of course, many people don't notice this, partly because they're not
really serious photographers, but also shooting under favorable
conditions: a nice sunny day, etc. Marginal and low light are
frequently auto-compensated for with higher ISO, and a higher ISO is
another way in which the photon collection rate S/N problem comes to
light. This is easy to test for yourself with a digital camera with
which you have full manual control...assuming of course that you
actually know what "noise" looks like in an image. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_noise http://www.dpreview.com/learn/?/Glos...g/Noise_01.htm http://www.dpreview.com/learn/?/key=pixels http://www.dpreview.com/learn/?/key=Pixel_Quality
-hh