The problem with cameras is that the limits are set by physics. The bigger your lens, the better the resolution. If only Apple could figure out a way to miniaturize visible light.
I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in thinking that if they made the phone a little bit thicker to make if flush, we could get some crazy battery life (and a headphone jack).
This race to thin phones with unusable battery life reminds me to the race to more and more mega pixels in digital cameras with unusable low exposition quality some years ago. It's just about the buzz, it just hinders the technology in order to be able to tell a more catchy number to consumers.
I would happily go with a 33% thicker iPhone with great battery life and a headphone jack and I doubt that most of the people would notice the difference in size.
Right, I feel like we're back in the days before iPhone when so many different companies were coming out with lame gimmicks to sell their flip phones and sliders that were all virtually identical. Maybe we're stuck here until wearable tech becomes more of a reality?
This option is already available to you: buy an aftermarket case/battery combo. I see these around all the time. The beauty of Apple selling millions of iPhone is there is a viable market for whatever accessory you may want.
People put up with all kinds of crap when it's the best option available. They're OK with it until something better comes along. In this case, a smartphone with a day of battery life trumps a flip phone with a week of battery life just because it can do so much more. You know what trumps a smartphone with X battery life? One with X+1 battery life, as long as it still fits comfortably in a trouser pocket. With the behemoth-screened phablets that are common these days, I think it's reasonable to make them a little thicker and a little more useful.
My phone's about 3 years old now. Even when it was new, I couldn't use it indiscriminately and expect a full day of charge. If I want to have it available for critical purposes like emergency calls, it's literally not usable in the way that I'd like to use it. I don't think that it's even remotely unreasonable to advocate for better battery life, and I think it's only a slight exaggeration to call current phone battery life "unusable".
Considering that only Apple phones run iOS, and there's only one Apple phone per physical device size bracket a generation, people don't really have a choice.
At least in the iPhone ecosystem it's not so much best option available, it's the only option available.
There's no immediate danger of people not buying iPhones because they want better battery life, so Apple doesn't even have to try harder than an average show of effort.
It doesn't negate the argument (even if it was hyperbole). I took an iPhone 5S out on a car trip yesterday across L.A., and forgot the car charger but hey it was fully charged. Used it for navigation for about 20 minutes total, and maybe 10 minutes total of phone calls. Checked email maybe 5 times. By about 8PM, the battery was at 2%, and I still needed to drive home. So the phone was unusable to me if I wanted to have ability to make an emergency call. And if the battery had gone down another 2%, the phone would have been entirely unusable.
My iPhone 2G had better battery life than this given similar usage patterns. Sure you can cite LTE vs. 2G and processor ability etc, but battery life made the modern(-ish) phone less useful to me under what I consider are not that strenuous of conditions. This is a real problem, and battery life will definitely be a major consideration to the next phone I buy.
> All these gimmicks and breakthroughs don't mean shit, make a phone that lasts 3 days and that will be a game changer.
Oh, I completely agree with that. It's more that I have an iPhone 5S that I replaced the battery in and it lasts for about 24 hours with my usage patterns -- would I love more? Heck yes I would! A phone not making it through from morning to evening though implies that it's likely a dying battery, as the iPhone 5S should last longer than that.
How many of these people have to consciously adapt their usage to make sure their phones still have juice at the end of the day? Yes, I can work with a phone where I look at the battery level and think "ok, better not do X now", but it would be better if I could always use it when I want to.
True but I'm not actually sure the smaller SE size is so bad--I'm not sure I actually need all this real estate. In fact, as I look to switch to an android phone because of this headphone nonsense, I'm actually finding my new problem is not being able to find a phone small enough!
Maybe I'll regret it but my next phone (and last iPhone) might be an SE.
FWIW, I switched from an iPhone 4 to a Z3 Compact because it was the only decent "small" phone available. But a 4.6 inch screen is not actually "compact", as far as I'm concerned. I switched back to iPhones for the SE, which isn't that much physically smaller, but is a lot more usable nonetheless.
It turns out the important dimensions are the overall width (for being able to hold it one handed) and the screen height (to reach everywhere with your thumb), and the iPhone SE's top and bottom bezels don't screw up either of those.
With the Z3C you can hold it one handed, but you can't use it effectively unless you have gigantic hands. Making a phone fit in one hand isn't enough; if the entire face is covered with screen then it still takes two hands to operate it.
Yep, the Sony Z3 compact did this a couple of years ago and was amazing. Top notch waterproof, superb battery, headphone jack, magnetic charger, SD card. Just one of those phones that really managed to hit the spot.
Oddly enough, the main complaint I had about it was that because it was so flush and shiny, it slid around too much on a table. Had to put a protective film on which was a bit more grippy.
And after marketing it as an underwater camera, they later backpedaled and said "waterproofing was tested in a standby state under laboratory conditions, do not attempt to use the phone underwater"?
> You mean those stupid plastic flaps with the gaskets that came unglued and prevented the flaps from even closing properly?
This. Girlfriend had that phone. The device and their after-sales service was completely garbage. Sony failed to repair the unplugging flaps, even after multiple service attempts. And every single time, they did complete factory reset on the phone to replace the flaps (!!!).
Then they didn't go and make the mistake of trying to slim too much for the next gen in the Z4 compact. The thing has incremental improvements on all the features you mentioned and battery life is just as good as it was before.
This was something that confused me a bit too. On their product page they mention twice (once as a bold headline) that the maximum aperture of the camera is f/1.8. Why?
I'm guessing that the average consumer has no idea what an f-stop is, or that having a maximum lens aperture of f/1.8 is any better than f/5.6 or f/16. And the people who do know probably also know that for a lens and sensor that are maybe a quarter of an inch wide, a bump in the maximum aperture is not going to make the camera perform anywhere near a dedicated camera, so the focus on that detail is a bit odd to me.
The iPhone is apparently the phone of choice for photographers, who know what an f stop is. I believe that spec is for them, everyone wants their f/1.2 L lens or whatever. Look at all of Apple's recent iPhone ads; they are all about the photos you can take (if you are willing to re-edit them in Photoshop to remove all the denoise and compression artifacts, which they even mention in the ads with a white-on-white disclaimer).
Small sensors are getting better. I am shocked at how good the image quality is on my RX100 (with a "one inch" sensor; one inch refers to the size of vacuum tube that would contain such a sensor if it were 1960 or something, no dimension is anywhere near one inch). I'm not going to give up 4x5 for it, but it's way better than a phone.
That said, the camera bump is ugly. Why can't they use a telephoto design (your 500mm SLR lens isn't 500mm long, remember).
The photo quality is - strange. It's not truly sharp or clean, especially in the far distance, and there's an odd softness and a hint of waxy sheen to it.
It's a look Nikon used to have ten or so years ago, and to me it suggests over-aggressive noise removal.
To be fair it's very good for a tiny camera, and amazing considering the state of the art ten years ago.
But I wonder if it's starting to fall into uncanny valley: the closer it gets to pro performance, the more obvious it becomes that it's not there yet.
They are, but they will also hit a physical wall at some point (if not already), and you'll continue trading "natural" dynamic range and low noise for software interpolated dynamic range and smoothing, which as others have noted, starts looking like Madame Tussaud's museum.
Then again, if Apple really wanted to impress me with their camera skills they would have to develop a medium format mirrorless digital camera for less than $5k. One can dream, I suppose.
Basically, pixels are so small these days that even tiny amount of camera motion is going to blur a point of light between two pixels. I'm not sure how much that matters, but I think it does. So you can't make the sensors small and increase the detail you get. 20MP is the best you are going to do with full-frame, much less APS-C or 1" or iPhone size. Maybe image stabilization fixes all of this.
I took some photos on an airplane of a lightning storm today with a 1" sensor camera. ISO 5000, .5 second exposure hand-held, and they're pretty sharp. Not portfolio sharp, but good enough for some Internet Points probably. My iPhone did not do well, however. (I tried that first, then realized, hey I have a better camera with me.)
It's a great point from a marketing perspective. Something users don't understand but can pretend too - I need this because it's got a f/1.8 camera, way better than the Samsung f/5.6 [I made that up]. What's super good is that it looks so technical, it looks like something that real cameras have about them too. Marketing fluff, yay.
Just like megapixels. The general public has this notion of "more megapixels is better". They don't understand that there's more to a camera than megapixels: F stops, low light performance, etc. I've actually met people who know 1080p "Full HD" is 1920x1080 but had no idea that it's only two megapixels.
It will perform better than f/2.2 of the old phone. I know several professional photographers who often carry the iPhone when they don't need all their equipment. Its not that hard to take good photos with it, especially with enough light
